Technical briefing: Anatomy of a bandwidth crunch

摘要

When an unmanned aerial vehicle such as Predator takes to the skies from a base in Southwest Asia and climbs to an altitude of 40,000 feet, a mission controller in a command center possibly thousand of miles away in the U.S. uses a commercial satellite link to direct the drone on its intended path, collecting information from a variety of onboard sensors at data rates that often demand an entire satellite transponder. The amount of bandwidth required for this is growing almost every month, because of increasing flights and the growing demand for more onboard sensors to collect ever more information. Intelsat General Corp. provides Ku-band satellite communications services to its military clients to support Predator and Global Hawk communications. Over time, as commercial satellite providers deploy Ka-band, the U.S. government should explore using commercial Ka-band bandwidth for military purposes to overcome constraints in its ability to support a large number of UAVs via the government's Wideband Global Satcom system.