September 5th, 2023 – Prof. Dr.-Ing. Andreas Knopp, director of Institute of Information Technology at the University of the Bundeswehr Munich and coordinator of the dtec.bw SeRANIS project has held a keynote speech “Distribution: a key enabler for future satellite systems” during the IEEE PIMRC Conference 2023, a flagship conference of the IEEE Communications Society. The presentation was given during a dedicated workshop on “Mega Constellation Satellite Networks for 6G” in front of an audience of international academic and industrial experts.
In his talk, Prof. Knopp emphasized the growing importance of satellites to meet the requirements of IMT-2030 (International Mobile Telecommunications), a framework that sets the objectives of 6G development. While around 4% of the Earth surface can be covered with terrestrial infrastructures, a so-called “Ubiquitous Connectivity” will only be possible with the integration of non-terrestrial networks. In this context, coordinated formations of small satellites, known as satellite swarms, appear as a key enabler to provide broadband connectivity to our everyday life smartphones. The efficient exploitation of frequency resources with beamforming solutions and the synchronization of swarm nodes represent some of the research challenges discussed by Prof. Knopp during his intervention.
The game-changing potential of coordinated distributed ground stations for high-speed data transfer between the ground network and the space segment was another key topic addressed in Prof. Knopp’s tutorial. The ever-growing demand for data rates in communication networks indeed confronts system designers with a risk of traffic congestion in the feeder link. In that respect, synchronized ground stations combined with the application of advanced multi-antenna signal processing schemes pave the way to highly efficient feeder link architectures.
The keynote speech of Prof. Knopp has been an excellent opportunity to make the research community aware of the SeRANIS project and to emphasize existing synergies, especially with the HARMONY project, a Horizon Europe MSCA Industrial Doctoral Network coordinated by Prof. Knopp’s institute.
