Leveraging Digital On-Board Processing to Increase Communications Satellite Flexibility and Effective Capacity

Communications satellite service providers, acutely aware of their need to remain competitive with terrestrial alternatives, have embraced payload technologies promising to lower their costs of service. Multi-Beam Antennas (MBAs), Digital Channelizers (DCs), Digital Channelizer Beamformers (DCBs) and even Fully Regenerative Processors (FRPs which demodulate, decode, packet switch, encode and modulate communications paths) have been adopted when the Size, Weight and Power (SWaP), financial and risk costs of doing so are outweighed by the increases in effective communications capacity and flexibility realized. The continuing advance of Moore’s Law in space together with advances in signal processing architectures have dramatically reduced the SWaP, monetary and risk costs of exploiting Digital On-Board Processing (OBP) to increase the effective capacity and flexibility of communications satellites. This paper reviews the advantages of these OBP approaches and examines the efficacy of Moore’s Law and advanced signal processing architectures in reducing the costs of adopting processed communications payload systems.