Design concept and methodology for the future Advanced Wideband Satellite system

The Advanced Wideband System (AWS) is being developed to provide worldwide, wideband communications capabilities to address the long term needs of the DoD for information transmission, reception, and handling. The proposed system will provide wideband fixed-to-fixed, fixed-to-mobile, mobile-to-mobile and other tactical communications services beyond those provided by current systems. This paper describes various payload options available for AWS, including fully-processed, bent-pipe transponder, and hybrid, but focuses on the development of a fully-processed payload architecture. A set of design objectives for future, fully-processed payloads are first identified and based on this defined set, a payload design concept approach and methodology are developed. For the constructed payload architecture, associated trade studies are identified to determine optimum weight, power, system performance and hardware complexity. In addition, a set of performance matrices are also derived to evaluate various proposed architecture concepts.