Digital Transparent Processor for Satellite Telecommunication Services

The Digital Transparent Processor (DTP) is an on-board application under development in Alcatel Alenia Space - Italy to accomplish increasing telecommunication´s market demand for flexibility, in terms of frequency and spatial allocation of traffic channels, realizing non-regenerative satellite connectivity. The way the DTP works, performing a digital filtering of up-link traffic channels coming from spots in RX and switching them to different spots in TX with a potentially different FDMA (frequency division multiple access) organisation, offers unique capabilities to create mesh networks between users having different allocated bandwidth and operating under different satellite coverage areas. The DTP offers a certain number of bandwidth granularity to which a single traffic channel or an FDMA-organized signal can be accommodated; the signals are not regenerated, but just ´isolated´ one each other by means of proper low-pass filtering (digitally adaptive) and then routed to the wanted output multiplexer, each one being associated to a TX coverage area.