Alan Campbell, AWS
Rus Healy, AWS
Alan Campbell, Principal Space Specialist Solutions Architect, AWS
The ground is changing for satellite communication systems. Operators are seeking to move towards digital teleport infrastructure to reduce physical infrastructure, enable seamless modem upgrades, and avoid vendor lock.
The new Waveform Architecture for Virtualized Ecosystems (WAVE) consortium aims to transform the Satcom industry to a fully interoperable ecosystem using intelligent, open, and virtualized networks with standardized architectures.
This paper discusses the role of Cloud Computing in this new path forward. Vendors can publish optimized waveforms in the Cloud marketplace for operators to consume. Government workloads can leverage multiple vendors yet still achieve a common heterogeneous computing hardware platform, switching seamlessly between waveforms.
Scalability and cost-efficiency is achieved via selection of the appropriate compute instance type – for example General Purpose Processors (GPP) may be suitable for demodulating and decoding sub-Ghz satellite bandwidth needs, whilst FPGA may be the choice to maximize digital IF modem density in higher bandwidth scenarios.
Finally, regional versus edge tradeoffs are discussed. The flexibility of on-demand compute in region is key, however some use-cases may require low-latency thus the same Cloud compute instance types need to exist at the teleport.