IP based reconfigurable digital platform for satellite communications

The increasing complexity of modern electronic systems involves a very fast growth in non-recurring costs. On the other hand, the life-cycle of modern telecommunication systems is reducing in the last years, because the adoption of new standards often requires to change or upgrade hardware units. The combination of the above mentioned trends gives less time to hardware manufacturers to regain investments needed to be competitive on the market. A way to sensitively reduce non-recurring costs is to design hardware blocks which can be re-used for different applications and for different standards. For these reasons, the interest in reconfigurable hardware platforms for satellite systems is growing up. In fact for these systems the hardware upgrading is unfeasible, and the number of produced units is small. In this paper, a reconfigurable digital platform approach for satellite systems is proposed. Different TX/RX architectures can be implemented by using the same hardware platform, allowing to adapt the system to the required service and to be compliant with the new emerging standards.