A fully-processed payload architecture for a very wideband mobile communications system

The Advanced Wideband System (AWS) is being developed to provide worldwide, wideband communications capabilities to address the long term needs of the DoD for information transmission, reception, and handling. This system will require wideband fixed-to-fixed, fixed-to-mobile, mobile-to-mobile and other tactical communications services, with maximum data rates on the order of hundreds of megabits per second. Based on the design methodology proposed in the paper titled "Design concept and methodology for the future Advanced Wideband Satellite system", this paper derives an optimum fully-processed payload architecture for a wideband, mobile communications system. The derived architecture is optimum in the sense that it will achieve minimum weight, power consumption and hardware complexity, with a channel capacity to support a required number of users. The paper also presents a link budget calculation to show that the payload architecture derived using our proposed approach achieves the desired link margin.