Standardization needed in satellite ground segment

The concluding session was co-organized by the TSDSI, IEEE-SA and SIA-India on standardization in satellite ground segment.

Udai Kumar Srivastava, Senior DDG and Head, NTIPRIT, DoT, Government of India, and Chair, said the ground segment is very critical. India needs to step up the game. There is need for standards for global harmonization. In March 2021, Telecom Engineering Center overhauled the specs for satellite communications. New technologies such as HTS, stand to gain from ground segment.

Nearly 50% of India's population is yet to be connected. Civilian and defense have realized the need for an open standard. New antennae will be needed to track mega constellations. Focus of policy makers need to define the equipment that will work. Capacity building is currently being handled by the NTIPRIT. We have keen interest about learning about standardization.

AK Mittal, Advisor, TSDSI, Co-chair and moderator, said we need to look at the standards for ground segment. We also need to look at legal and other issues.

Abhishek Malhotra, Managing Partner, TMT Law Practice and lawyer, said that we can advise clients where the liabilities lie. We need to look at the industry standards. There are certain guiding principles with protection of data and privacy. Standards made applicable for industries need to be followed. Standardization becomes important. It will look to some documents being followed by industry. Data protection is still nascent in India. We need to bring in standards for satellite ground segment. We need inputs from the industry, besides law makers. Data volume should have some mission requirements. What are you budgetary limitations?

Vulnerability points can be the Internet itself. There is also the resort to long-range telemetry, etc. It is subject to both interception and tampering. It becomes extremely important to mandate how data is being collected, and used. We are now moving towards the growth of non-state players. A dialog between the industry and policy makers is much needed.

Dr. Ms. Neha Satak, CEO, Astrome Technologies Pvt Ltd, said that satellite communications is going through change. It was earlier used for niche apps. Now, it is becoming urban consumption. It will create data capacity with good latency. We can expect lot of this capacity to be used for niche apps, powering 4G/5G towers for rural areas, etc. Cost comes into play. Standardization is important as there should be ground terminals that are interoperable. The scale should be reached. Interoperability holds the key for reaching the scale.

Dr. PK Jain, Associate Director, Frequency Management and Satcom Planning, Satcom PO, ISRO, noted that standardization and global harmonization are needed. We need to tap benefits of the economy of scale. In India, we need to have that. The process should begin with harmonization of frequency bands with different segments. Next, we should have national frequency allocation plan by DoT. It brings out the interface requirements. Third, we need to look at the interface requirements, and how they work. DTH uses satellite differently than broadband. We also need to address the frequency allocation for ground segment. The Government of India has addressed most of the issues. We need to further work on new satellite constellations for tracking and stationary.

What are the other things that need standards? Dr. Ms. Neha Satak, Astrome, said they need to address further LEO needs, via electronically, or mechanically. In future, one ground terminal may speak with multiple terminals. There needs to be in harmony with them.

Talking about IoT and other issues for ground stations, Dr. Ranga Rao Venkatesha Prasad, IEEE Distinguished Lecturer, Fellow IETE, and TU Delft, Netherlands, said that there are GSaaS requirements, standards, and policies. These include modularization SoA in architecture and pricing, standardization in access control and QoS, and demand and market perspectives. We also need to have policies, rules and regulations, and laws that are country-specific and international. We can also bring multiple ground stations and offer services.

We can also have space IoT. Space IoT drives the new ground station requirements. Some examples are IoT node from SWARM, Iridium module, and IoT node from Lacuna. Gateways can also be provided as service, so that you can segregate and offer data packs. We will have optical ground stations in the future. There are HTS from Starlink and Astronome. Challenges include real-time, latency, and congestion. There is also need for new standards. SDR and SDN in GSaaS are going to play a major role. There are new standards for GSaaS and space. We need to build alliances in the future. IEEE has standardization cycle in place.