The delivery of high throughput data services requires the use of tens or hundreds of gateways. The cost-effective implementation of such a large number of gateways prompts multiple design questions including:-
- How many gateways are needed?
- How many diversity gateways?
- Where should the gateways be located for best availability?
- What is the optimum gain for each gateway antenna?
- What is the optimum link budget/fade margin?
- How do we manage and operate the gateways?
- Can I support multiple services?
The Design Tool applies the Atheras proprietary Outage Prediction Algorithm (OPA) to historic rainfall measurements for specific gateway locations to determine the historic satellite link availability for those locations. Applying the OPA to multiple gateway locations across a region permits a satellite operator to (i) analyse each candidate gateway site for historic link availability, (ii) determine weather correlations between individual candidate sites and (iii) determine overall network availability for specific groups of gateway locations.
Applying this process in an iterative manner to different groupings of gateway locations enables a satellite operator to optimise the design of a network for maximum overall network availability based on selecting (i) gateways with the “best” historic link availability and (ii) groupings of gateways with the maximum weather independence between gateway locations to minimise the number of sites affected by the same weather system at the same time.
The Design Tool will hence enable satellite operators to optimise the selection of gateways for their next-generation, multi-gateway satellite networks to provide the most cost-effective network configuration