VIA-SATELLITE TRIALS OF W-CDMA MULTIMEDIA BROADCASTING AND INTERACTIVE PACKET ACCESS: THE ESA ADVANCED TEST BED (ATB) PROJECT

摘要

This paper provides an overview on the ESA-funded Advanced S-UMTS Test Bed (ATB) project, intended to define,rnvalidate and demonstrate 3G mobile via-satellite services. One of the main project targets is to develop a set of technicalrnsolutions for the interactive packet-access aiming to efficiently exploit the radio resources, as well as for the multicastmode,rnso opening the road to the deployment of those multimedia broadcasting services which are predicted tornrepresent the most important Satellite-UMTS (S-UMTS) market share. After illustrating the main aims of ATB, thernpaper presents the architecture of the real-time end-to-end Test Bed which was developed to support both laboratoryrnand over-the-air trials, and provides a brief description of its main constituting elements. Finally, the architecture of thernoverall via-satellite demonstrator is addressed. Presently, the ATB hardware is in final integration stage at SpacernEngineering, and via-satellite trials are planned to take place by the second half of year 2003.