Marke Clinger, Kratos Defense & Security Solutions, Inc.
Bruno Destrez, Kratos Defense & Security Solutions, Inc.
Marke Clinger, Strategic Account & BD Director, EMEA, Kratos Defense & Security Solutions, Inc.
To address market trends and provide solutions to the issues they create for smallsat operators and GSaaS providers, Kratos developed a new age space strategy built on three key pillars, digitization, virtualization and orchestration. While some customers tend to implement one or more of these, to truly address market changes and become the dominant satellite services provider, all pillars must be implemented.
To support an agile, scalable, and extensible software-defined architecture, the RF must enter the digital domain as close to the aperture as possible. Once in the digital domain, the digitized spectrum (RF/IF) is transported over standard IT networks using open standards such as the IEEE-ISTO Std 4900-2021: Digital IF Interoperability Standard (DIFI) for VITA 49.
While a fundamental keystone, digitizing the RF spectrum at the antenna using DIFI VITA 49 is only half of the digitizing strategy. Given the real-time, stream requirements of satellite communications, deterministic, high quality, assured transport of digitized spectrum over standard IT networks must be achieved.
A traditional ground network architecture based on a legacy framework will never scale sufficiently – neither economically nor technically – as higher orders of magnitude in bandwidth management and reconfiguration requirements become challenging. With the entire spectrum digitized at the aperture and assured transportation in place, network function virtualization, or the process of decoupling the network functions from proprietary hardware, provides a new way to create, distribute, and operate network services.
Virtual Network Functions themselves are not a disruptive technology but rather the advancement of their predecessors. Offerings can be developed and deployed rapidly through a combination or re-combination of VNFs to generate services. These NFV based services, potentially including modems, processors, recorders, combiners, etc., offer extensibility, interoperability and scalability while maintaining or improving responsiveness and resilience in an architecture built to be future-proof from the ground up.
This proposed new age space strategy goes beyond virtualization of individual network functions by employing techniques such as service orchestration, resource orchestration, and service chaining to design, deploy, and manage networks – the true power of SDN. With spectrum digitized, software-defined ground systems can be orchestrated together as an integrated, synchronized system in a cloud environment. As satellite payloads reconfigure, the VNFs adjust, performing digital signal processing, scaling, and optimizing performance on the ground.
Orchestration manages flexible scaling and load balancing, supporting and simplifying software upgrades and resource utilization in a virtual environment. Orchestration provides uniform management of mixed configurations across cloud infrastructure. As a result of the flexibility and scalability that orchestration provides, the complexity of the network rapidly increases. Management of a network today is more than response times to incidents, customers are looking for service providers who can offer ease of integration within the ground and space layers, facilitate extensive automation, and streamline interconnections with a customer’s private network(s).
A comprehensive platform approach versus managing individual functions, applications, or appliances enables service providers to bring existing equipment and next-generation networks under one management system providing a common operating picture across the enterprise. Unifying disparate systems into one view delivers the advantage of gaining deeper insights through enhanced visibility into network performance leading to improved quality of service (QoS), customer satisfaction, and revenue.
The digital transformation of ground systems supports the innovations of large constellations and satellite flexibility. It enables a shift from purpose-built systems intended for more static environments, to software-defined virtual systems designed for highly resilient, dynamic systems.
The use of digitization, virtualization and orchestration in a software-defined ground architecture is the key to the future of connecting satellite systems, communication service providers, terrestrial networks, and the global sharing of data and analytics. High-value services, such as overall network availability, are the initial targets of orchestration, but the goal for mission operators is incorporating every aspect of service management into an orchestrated architecture. Improving the mission experience to create an environment which anticipates and reacts faster to any user need or threat related to the services is critical.
Orchestration enables ground system and satellite operators to be the engine of continuous change and adaptation to the user needs. A scalable, extensible, multi-domain management platform capable of reporting across multiple dimensions leverages enhanced analytics engines, real-time dashboards, and historical reporting to gain insight into the network – offering maximum uptime and improved SLAs for a provider’s customer base.