HEO satellite constellation for providing broadband services

There has been tremendous growth in overall demand for broadband telecommunication services driven by the Internet, multimedia communications, and business requirements in both urban and rural communities. Existing telecommunication networks have limited capacity and bandwidth. Satellite based broadband services (SBBS) is a promising solution. Satellites provide wide coverage with broadcasting and multicasting capabilities away from any domestic or global traffic. A proper combination of satellite and fiber optic networks provides the most powerful system for current and future market demands including broadband multimedia services for corporate, governmental, medical, and educational applications. This paper explores the required infrastructure and system level design for the SBBS with a focus on the space segment, network control segment, and the ground segment. It elaborates on a highly elliptical orbit (HEO) satellite constellation with enhanced redundancy and coverage as the backbone network in space. This network, in conjunction with the terrestrial fiber optic networks, provides efficient broadband multimedia services. The proposed system utilises smart satellites with onboard routing, switching and processing capacity enabled by reconfigurable computing technology. Modeling and simulation results for different feasible scenarios for the proposed constellation are presented. The paper also explores optical inter-satellite links between the satellites in the constellation to enable laser bi-directional communication for the network nodes in space.