A GEO Satellite System for Broadcast Audio and Multimedia Services Targeting Mobile Users in Europe

Despite the unqualified success of XM's GEO based satellite radio in the US, some skepticism remained until recently that this success could be duplicated in Europe and that a much more expensive HEO-based system would be needed to achieve the same success. This argument focused on the following challenges that a European GEO system needed to overcome: a) Low elevation angles b) Spectrum scarcity resulting from ETSI allocating only 12.5 MHz for satellite radio for all of Europe c) The large number of countries and languages to be supported The paper introduces the ETSI SDR (Satellite Digital Radio) waveform and describes its key attributes in detail to show how this key piece of technology has enabled WorldSpace to overcome the perceived limitations of a GEO system to develop and deploy the first Satellite Radio service in Europe. The key attributes discussed include the following: a) Flexibility & Spectrum Efficiency b) Fine Grain Control: dynamic service/channel level resource allocation; large number of modulation schemes supported; variable length interleaver rArr just the right QoS for each application c) Advanced FEC: Turbo Coding; large complement of code rates supported rArr Leads to additional Link Margin or capacity. The paper concludes by describing the first European Satellite Radio system developed by WorldSpace and its first results in the Milan, Italy area.