Ka-band services and technologies

This paper summarizes the potential interactive multimedia services to be offered by future Ka-band systems. The focus is on examining the nature and characteristics of the potential end-user services and system configurations. In addition, the Ka-band system technologies facilitating deployment of these services are reviewed, strongly indicating that the technologies required for “bent-pipe” and regenerative Ka-band systems are ready for flight for some system scenarios, and within a few years for the scenarios with more complex on-board processing