Technology goals for high-capacity communications satellites

Assuming certain traffic and earth station characteristics, three satellite system architectures are developed in order to define desirable interface and performance goals for satellite processing technology development. Architecture I employs 6/4 and 14/11 GHz bands with baseband processing; architecture II adds the use of the 30/20 GHz band to those above; architecture III uses all three pairs of bands without baseband processing. It is shown that full exploitation of the 14/11 GHz band with wideband transponders permits mass reductions in the antenna subsystem and power reductions in the baseband processor. Technological improvement is suggested for on-board switching of the baseband, 4 GHz, and 11 GHz, for on-board modulators and demodulators of 4 GHz and 11 GHz, and for on-board buffer storage elements.