Incorporation of UMTS Future Capabilities for MUOS Evolution

The mobile user objective system (MUOS) is DoD's next generation UHF SATCOM system. The MUOS design is based on the commercial 3G UMTS/WCDMA architecture. As a commercial architecture, UMTS is continually evolving to provide new and improved features and services to its customers. By leveraging this architecture and much of its associated ground components, MUOS may also be able to incorporate new UMTS features and services with limited development. This paper discusses some UMTS future capabilities that may be considered for incorporation into future upgrades of MUOS. This includes discussion of the possible benefit to MUOS users, and the extent of interest from commercial vendors in providing these features. The former helps characterize the potential need for the feature, while the latter helps us speculate on how strongly MUOS may leverage evolution of the commercial product