The Enhancement of DVB-S2 & DVB-RCS by Adding Additional Mobile User Capability

The use of DVB-S and DVB-RCS for conducting two-way communications from small satellite terminals has become well established in Europe and elsewhere. During the development of the DVB-RCS Standard in DVB and ETSI the possibility of limited use for satellite terminals that were moving was considered in Jan 2004 and, after much discussion, incorporated into Annex L of the Guideline document associated with the standard in April 2005. At that time it was noted that with regard to the ETRI¹ contributions, covering mobility for DVB-RCS much more extensively, that this matter be addressed as a future development. This paper addresses the steps that have been taken since then to realise this objective and the progress to date. Thanks to projects conducted during the last 2 years, it has been show that the DVB-S2/DVB-RCS standards are good candidate baselines for the efficient implementation of broadband services to mobile users. Results of these studies are gathered in a study mission report from the TM-RCS ad-hoc group members. Among these results it has been demonstrated that both forward and return channels waveforms are impacted by the mobile usage and should therefore be addressed in the scope of a revision of the DVB RCS standard. Technical results show that DVB-RCS, as it has been designed for fixed satellite services, provides most of the features required by mobile applications above 5 GHz, and could be turned into a competitive solution with a few carefully crafted modifications. This paper outlines these aspects and the progress to date in implementing them