Demonstrating Radio Burst Switching by satellite in the ULISS project

This paper will present the ULtra fast Internet Satellite Switching (ULISS) demonstrator capabilities developed by the telecom research department of Thales Alenia Space France and the project partners. The goal of the ULISS project is to demonstrate the feasibility of a promising switching solution called Radio Burst Switching. This concept proposes to upgrade a Digital Transparent Processor technology (DTP) to perform mesh packet switching missions as it was only possible before with regenerative processors. The approach of this demonstrator will be first described, offering unique opportunity to combine realistic user signal degradation along the air propagation as well as the impairments raised by the processor implementation. The wide range of protocols layers covered by the demonstrator will be presented from the link layer up to the ones dealing with the Internet traffic and DVB-RCS radio access protocols. It will be also shown that the results provided by the ULISS demonstrator would have never been computable by using combined simulator.