In contrast to the current design where satellite communications and satellite remote sensing are designed separately and operated on orthogonal resources, the objective of this project is to design satellite networks for the joint purpose of communication and remote sensing.

This work item is performed by Imperial College London and the University of Luxembourg.

This working item aims at reviewing the main trends and evolutions in communication and signal processing techniques applied over fibre optics, identifying the most promising ones that could bring a benefit to space-based optical communications. The identified techniques shall be assessed over a realistic optical satellite channel by means of numerical simulations.

This work item is performed by the University of Luxembourg, University of Parma and DLR.

With the advent of LEO/MEO/GEO mega-constellations, multiple satellite visibility will provide a new dimension to enhance the connectivity and performance indicators of the communication network. To materialise this vision and leverage multi-connectivity, this work item aims to investigate novel radio resource management techniques suitable for the emerging system scenarios addressing multiple satellites with multiple routing options in space.  This activity will also aim to investigate the benefit of graph signal processing to optimize jointly diverse resources and different constraints applicable to radio resource management for the selected system scenarios.

This work item aims at performing a short term propagation experiment in EHF bands, namely in Q/V (40/50 GHz) and/or W down- and up-link (75/85 GHz) bands.  Given the short term nature of the experiment, most probably it needs to be focused on clear sky effects (e.g. scintillations), as measuring precipitation in a statistical significant manner requires long term collection of data. New inventive and pragmatic ideas that employ even terrestrial-based measurements in order to extrapolate with confidence the conclusions to Earth-space slant paths are sought for. For example, employing a transmitter on a hill or mountain to mimic a low elevation satellite link. 

This work item is performed by RAL-Space and the National Technical University of Athens.

This work item aims at studying and characterizing the effect of beam squinting on the end to end physical layer performance of the forward link of HTS systems. Performance optimization techniques shall also be developed and simulated.

This work item is performed by the University of Bradford.

The scope of the activity is to identify scenarios where RIS and holographic beamforming could show a great impact on current satellite communication systems. A list of potential use cases ranging from user terminals to space-borne systems should be provided and ranked. Most promising scenarios will be evaluated in terms of systems performance enhancements considering close-to-real RF impairments.

In this work item there are involved TU Ilmenau and TU Braunschweig.

The goal of this WI is to evaluate the potential of this novel scenario of beamforming considering multiple satellites. First, the single-user use case is considered and, posteriorly, the potential multi-beam transmission approach as well. Sensitivity analysis with respect to synchronization efforts is studied as well.

In this work item there involved the University of the Bundeswehr Munich, U. Bremen, CTTC and Heriot-Watt University.

The goal of this activity is to further elaborate beamforming and inter-satellite beam hand-over techniques for GSO and NGSO satellite communication systems. Considering the potential use of available 3GPP procedures together with legacy satellite beamforming solutions and potential ad-hoc information sources, novel approaches to tackle challenging scenarios (NGSO beam-handovers in low elevations, urban areas channel conditions, etc.) are analyzed.

In this work item there are involved CTTC and CNIT.

The activity aims to evaluate different new approaches for communication/sensing waveform design in order to accommodate dual-spectrum use. In particular, recent advances in signal processing techniques are explored to investigate the waveform OTFS and its application for satellite systems.

In this work item there are involved U. Luxembourg, U. Parma and G. Caire.

The goal of this activity is to investigate learning techniques for propagation prediction in high-frequency bands. Data-driven Solutions including (but not limited to) deep learning will be analysed in this work item.

In this work item there is involved National Technical University of Athens.

This work item focuses on the use of machine learning techniques in the routing optimization of mega-constellations.

In this work item there are involved University of Malaga, Aalborg University, University of Luxembourg and University of Siena.

The aim of this activity is to investigate the synergies between legacy RF satellite systems the future quantum technology equipment. Without any reference to QKD scenarios, the study shall focus on the opportunities in the
medium-term related to the appearance of optical links equipped with certain quantum technology.

In this work item there are involved Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona and University of Geneve.

This project aims to design NB-IoT MAC procedures optimization to ease integration with NTN, by reducing signaling congestion and optimizing the message flow of the protocol.

In this work item there are involved LIST, University of Luxembourg and University of Bologna.