European Space Agency (ESA) SATNEX V WI Y4.6 Mesh satellite communications

Although non-terrestrial networks (NTN) and mega constellations have been a very active research topic in the last years, most of the design work has focused on the space segment and the constellation topology, with little effort devoted to the constraints imposed by the availability of the ground segment. The feeder, forward and return, is very often a bottleneck in the communications, and the assumption that a dense, ground network is always available globally is not realistic. Without a guaranteed link to ground infrastructure for each time-space tuple, the network must be capable of working in a gateway-less mode. Thus, the system becomes a mesh network in which ground terminals/devices communicate with each other using the satellites, but without the intervention of the gateway, in a dynamic and non-hierarchicall way. The work will focus on the design of the direct user-to-satellite access links and on the allocation of traffic flows across the network.