New frontiers for the mobile satellite interactive services

The new generation multi-spot Ka band satellites increase dramatically the offer of capacity whose cost is consequently reduced and give promising perspectives for fix interactive broadband services and mobile services. However, if on one hand the market and deployment of fix interactive broadband services definitely benefit from Ka band, on the other hand concerning mobile services the drawback of a multi-spot coverage is the huge effort required for preparing the ground segment infrastructures and the associated technologies. A few examples of the issues Eutelsat is working on are the development of high performances Ka band low profile antennas and satellite systems able to manage the handover from one satellite spot-beam to another, the mitigation of the fading impacting the transmissions to/from mobiles and the dynamic routing of IP traffic. This paper describes the approach adopted by Eutelsat together with some partners in order to solve these problems on different communication layers, in view of the launch of the satellite KA-SAT. Preliminary analysis and results, also built on past experiences done in Ku band, are presented.