Evolutionary architectures for future multimedia services

The linear architecture has continued throughout most of telecommunications history and almost into the twenty-first century. Small traffic streams from local communities were bundled into ever-larger groups, super-groups, and master-groups at various switch levels before being assigned to a trunk transmission route. It was only natural, therefore, to continue using this linear architecture into the satellite era. This paper discusses the logic behind the choice of the first international telecommunications satellite architecture, the slow change in this architecture to accommodate new types of traffic, and the “revolutionary” architectures of the latest low Earth orbit (LEO) and medium Earth orbit (MEO) proposals for carrying a variety of traffic types: the multimedia services