Intelligence Community, Military Face Challenges From High Throughput Satellites

GVF Roundtable Discussion on HTS Challenges

Image credit: Steve Schuster

[Satellite TODAY 05-23-13] As satellite communications technologies evolve and new applications become available for the intelligence community, military and private sector business, new operational and engineering challenges also emerge in both the space segment and a range of ground segment environments. These challenges served as fodder for a discussion at a High Throughput Satellite (HTS) roundtable discussion hosted by GVF on May 21 in Washington D.C.

Rajeev Gopal, senior director of advanced programs for Hughes Defense and Intelligence Systems Division said one challenge Hughes faces is increased demand. “You need coverage, you need capacity and you need very good management so that you can install, provision, operate and do the diagnostics very effectively and cost effectively,” Gopal said.

Another panelist David Bettinger, chief technology officer, iDirect said he sees HTS as an opportunity to offer increased bandwidth at lower costs. “We are pretty excited about some of the advances that are going on the satellites themselves to bring back some flexibility to the footprints of bandwidth allocations,” Bettinger said.

But along with those benefits, Bettinger notes challenges too. “We have to interface with all of these [satellite operators and manufacturers] as a diagnostic technology provider,” Bettinger said. While full-hub diversity is another important challenge, “We are excited with the direction everything is going,” he noted.

But Bettinger has determined these obstacles are not insurmountable. “We effectively operated a network seamlessly through a hub based rain storm by switching our traffic over to a series of line cards at a different location,” he said.

Routing issues have also become another challenge. “Having an airplane flying over someone else’s country and having that service terminate and teleport in a different country. There are a large number of countries out there that prefer to look at that data first,” Bettinger said.

“From an IP standpoint we’ve had to make a lot of advances certainly advancing IPV6,” he said. Martin Coleman executive director of sIRG said, “We can do a lot from the ground and that’s cost effective. Keep the satellites and payloads simple,” he suggested.

According to Coleman, the biggest challenge is “to get smarter on the ground.” And that often comes with a price. “The military may pave the way with research and get us better satellites,” Coleman said. That solution only comes with time, he noted.

“But whatever [benefits] comes out of that won’t come to the commercial sector probably for another 25 or even 30 years. That’s a lot of service we have to provide because our customers want it now,” Coleman added.

In the meantime other challenges include jamming which he referred to as “difficult cases.” Coleman said while he can’t discuss the specifics, his company is presently working on uplink suppression tests and will unveil his findings on June 10 at an upcoming conference.

Follow Steve Schuster on Twitter @stevenschuster.

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Intelligence Community, Military Face Challenges From High Throughput Satellites