Influences of Standardization and the Impact of

Establishing Multichannel Bridges to Shared Commercial Satellite

Communications

Proposal for Research to Dr. Sungjune Park

University of North Carolina at CharlotteSubmitted by Bjarne Berg

in partial fulfillment of requirements for INFO-8203 Telecommunication and Computer Networks

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The Marketplace and Standards

While the market for civilian use of mobile satellite communication has increased over the years, there are few low-cost alternatives for the mobile consumer.

The challenge is that the various networks have been developed with different technologies and area coverage’s. European, Asian and American vendors have all aligned themselves with competing and overlapping technologies

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LEOs, MEOs and GEOs – limited number of slots

Since the race towards commercializing space had few standards, and sometimes conflicting national standards, there was a tremendous usage of the very limited 180 GEO (geosynchronous earth orbit) slots at the equator [3].

As a result, the high availability of slots for LEO (low earth orbit) has been extensive used. However, because of their low orbit, these have a limited stationary lifetime before they have to be replaced.

Even the number of MEO (medium earth orbit) positions is now approaching saturation. There are also tradeoffs of these orbits. While LEOs and MEOs are line of sight and have lower costs, a service provider needs more of them to span the same areas as can be covered by a GEO (still limited to structures).

As a result of this need for higher numbers and lower investment costs per unit, the majority of new commercial satellites have been LEO and MEOs.

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Software bridges and routers for Satellite networks

To reduce the costs of building these overlapping and competing networks, and to increase the utilizations and coverage, bridge software solutions could be created to take advantage of the existing coverage’s and capabilities.

This would also alleviate the maintenance of the many networks, and free up several of the orbits now occupied by the overlapping satellites. While this utopian proposal may not be in the interest of the various companies involved, there is a strong incentive for the national governments to cooperate and enforce development standard ‘bridges’ without creating yet another satellite network ‘standard’ that is hard to enforce.

The benefits include lower cost access to reliable networks, ability to stream multimedia to large audiences, increased redundancies and lessen network vulnerability to individual satellite failures.

The challenge to this vision is to create economic incentives and motivation for the various vendors and governments to participate in such an endeavor.

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Historical view of literature

The majority of the research into the technical usage of satellite communication was published in the years between 1970 and 1990.

During this timeframe a total of over 9,800 network and communication articles were published in 13 academic and 11 practitioner journals [1].

It is useful to examining the publication using Adams Era model proposed in his 1991 framework for Communication publications.

Based on this model, the publications are segmented into three distinct Eras. Era-1 is defined as being focused around the vendor equipment and performance.

Era-2 consists of articles around the integration and standards, while Era-3 consists of articles around usage and impacts of networks.

Time Research focusEra 1 Vendor equipment, capabilities and performanceEra 2 Integration and standardsEra 3 Usage, social/economical impacts

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Historical view of literature

Our research is focusing on Era-2 articles. In this core research period between 1977-1987, when many of the large networks that are now in operation were built or designed, there were a total of 123 academic articles published. These publications peaked with 21 articles in 1983 with the proposed Strategic Defense Initiative of the Regan administration.

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1977 1978 1979 1980 1981 1982 1983 1984 1985 1986 1987

Era-1 Articles Era-2 Articles

At the same time there were 44 articles that focused on the vendor specific systems (era-1). This trend reversed, and by 1987 an even balance of articles focused on integration and standards. The focus of usage of the systems and organizational impacts came later in the 1990’s

This is an important research trend as vendors have attempted to leverage the systems and standards, we have seen a lesser focus on the vendor specific capabilities and more on research publications concerning standardization, integration and application connectivity.

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Application Connectivity and Orbits

Application connectivity is the focus of research initiatives that are looking to leverage the unused bandwidth for leveraged systems such as on-demand streaming media [5].

Since these systems have inherent geographical reach and “flexible and rapid deployment features… satellite networks systems are seen as an attractive solution to realize the vision of global broadband multimedia infrastructure(s)” [6].

However, the application connectivity challenges are numerous. First, for a system to have a fixed orbit it either requires a LEO that has relative high costs for the areas covered (low cost for a point-solution), or a GEO that is frequently blocked by buildings and other structures.

This leads either to the need for MEOs with a hybrid of the benefits, a quasi-stationary system [7], or the reusability of the existing networks of LEO, GEO and MEOs.

Also, since the vision is to interact with the existing ground based networks, the systems must also be able to interact with the existing infrastructure [8,9],

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Batch Satellite Sending

A proposed way to accomplish this in practice has been to let all recipients receive a ‘session package’ that tracks what they are receiving. After a period of the satellite broadcast, the recipients then sends a ‘reply package’ back to the provider.

This ‘reply package’ contains download speeds, interference, location and signal strength. Based on this reply, the system should be able to find alternative satellites that are close and start the broadcast from where the other left off, without having to start from the beginning [5].

The bridge would therefore have built in redundancies and performance enhancements. The latter would be accomplished automatically in large broadcasts, as the outer rim audience’s poor reception would be re-routed to satellites closer to them.

It would also allow the system to take advantage on both LEO, MEO and GEOs, regardless of their transfer speeds and system protocols (interface and balancing should be provided by the bridge).

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Interference

A technical problem of the unified network is the possibility of electronic interference between the shared resources [3].

The traditional way of overcoming this is to use code division multiple access (CDMA) . However, of the many licenses issued for commercial use, only GlobalStar has ever gone into operations [12].

The other CDMA provider, SkyBridge is an aerial satellite communication network for quasi governmental agencies.

Another way to increase the flexibility of the networks, is to simply provide a set of non-stationary satellites that can reuse the frequencies the same way that the cell-phones are using the cells in a mobile phone network. This would mean that there would be a set of frequencies aligned with territories, instead of satellites

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Standards and Governing Bodies

Currently, there are many agencies that governs, or attempts to govern the satellite network and the space agencies.

Today the Federal Communication Commission (FCC) operates in the USA and managed the US frequencies and commercial use of the Satellite networks.

There is also the international body called The World Radio Council (WRC) which manages frequencies. However, this body only meets every 3rd year.

There is also the separated international governing body called the International Telecommunications Union (ITU). However, this organization focuses predominantly on satellite interference issues [3].

In addition to these there are influencing bodies such as NASA, ESA, CNSA (China National Space Administration), RSA (Russian Space Agency), UNPSAST (UN Programme on Space Applications Space Technology) and a variety of other national and international organizations.

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Standards and Governing Bodies – Limited Success

The many agencies that operate in this space and the lack of continuous cooperation create a problem of standardization [17].

The only area of relative agreement of communication standards have been for commercial Airline safety systems with operates on Aeronautical Mobile-Satellite Service (AMSS) networks on both Immersat and the relatively new CBB (Connexion-by-Boeing) networks [2].

The reasoning for this cooperation on two different networks on different standards and technology has been commercial incentives. This limited success has been carried forward and in 2003, the World Radio Council approved additional usage of the system at a different frequency for non-safety communication (resolution ITU-R-M.1643) [14].

The target of this approval is to provide broadband access to airline passengers and crew.

Again, it was financial motivations, standards in the aircrafts/receivers and incentives among the three major airline manufacturers that led to this breakthrough.

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Research Questions and direction.

The first research question is to explore what motivates national bodies to cooperate in standard settings when it may not be in their national perceived interest to do so.

The second research area is to examine if there are divergent factors for commercial and national interests of cooperation a proposed by some researchers [18], and if this is reduces as the number of actors are reduced.

The divergent factor theory may hold true since the financial motivations for fewer actors may create higher homogeneity and be of more direct importance than those of a group of actors.

The last area or research is to examine the ability of commercial enterprises to dictate, or influence, the standards selected by national governing bodies.

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Methodology

The research proposed would start looking at the historical satellite standardization decisions and the divergence of standards in the context of military alliances (most satellite networks were originally for military usage until the 1970s).

This would be accomplished by clustering the standards adopted based on the NATO, Warsaw-pact, Commonwealth and the non-aggression Asia-pact.

We would expect to see a high convergence of the standard adaptations based on geographical space of the alliances and the relative importance of the alliances (i.e. NATO 1946-1990).

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Methodology

The second research question would be answered by examining the evolution of networks for the aviation industry and see if the number of actors in an industry has an effect [15].

This is done by mapping the number of approved ITU and WRC resolutions to the number of airplane manufacturing companies. It is expected that the decline in the number of commercial airline manufacturers has led to fewer discussion and disagreements.

It may also lead to fewer objections by national governments since they may have less domestic pressure to support competing standards.

If this holds true, we should see an increase in the approved international standard resolutions as passed by ITU and WRC.