Abstract
This paper discusses relevant architectural trade‐offs performed to design the EuroSkyWay (ESW) satellite system for multimedia communications. The broadband satellite system aims at delivering multimedia services directly to the final users utilizing geostationary satellites. The system is designed to represent a cost effective solution to provide multimedia services throughout Europe, Africa and Middle East with the possibility of integration with the Global Information Infrastructure (GII) platform as well as with other satellite or terrestrial wide area networks.
The overall system architecture is based on the baseline regional system, that will cover Europe and some other countries close to Europe (the ‘extended Europe’), using only one satellite. The satellite network will be progressively increased with more satellites, grouped in clusters, both to extend coverage to other landmasses in the world and to increase the overall sellable capacity on already covered areas. Emphasis is given to the system trade‐offs for satellite performance dimensioning and to the issues relevant to the radio link dimensioning to ensure the needed link quality and data rate for multimedia services provision while keeping as key driver the user terminal low cost and ease of installation.
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