Expo & Sponsorship Sales:  Schedule a Call  or  +44 7773 770269

Enabling Interoperable SatCom with DIFI

Typical SatCom ground system deployments rely on single vendor solutions that involve complicated and time-consuming integration work when looking to support other vendors and other satellite network operators. The mission of the Digital Intermediate Frequency Interoperability (DIFI) Consortium is to provide a simple, open, interoperable Digital IF/RF standard that replaces the natural interoperability of analog IF signals and helps prevent such vendor lock-in. In this workshop we will be looking at the DIFI standard, it’s implementation to enable virtualization of some ground-system infrastructure and demonstrate a multi-vendor solution for demonstration of DIFI in action.

An introduction to DIFI – Impacts of virtualization on hardware design and network security – DIFI systems and components – Demonstration: Keysight will demo the DIFI ecosystem converter test with our radio frequency (RF) and network emulation solutions. In the RF domain of the DIFI RF/IF converter (IFC), Keysight’s M9484C VXG vector signal generator will be used to generate a “golden” RF signal source signal. The VXG vector signal generator can generate signals up to 54 GHz with 2.5 GHz of modulation bandwidth per channel. The VXG can be configured with a maximum of 4 phase coherent channels. On the other side of the IFC we have the Ethernet domain. This is where Keysight’s Pathwave Vector Signal Analysis (VSA) software comes into play. Keysight’s PathWave Vector Signal Analysis software offers a comprehensive set of tools for demodulation and vector signal analysis of modern custom modulation, DVB-S2X, and 5G communication standards, and more. The VSA software can demodulate the DIFI signal coming from the IFC in the Ethernet domain, showing the “health” of the waveform that’s being transferred, the RF signal that is being transferred through the converter via DIFI/VITA49. In this DIFI ecosystem converter test demonstration, we will be demodulating a DVB-S2X 256 APSK signal on our DIFI / VITA 49 analyzer mode. Keysight’s Ixia BreakingPoint software running on a traffic generator for network security test, then acts as the “golden” modem response and upstream source that provides the stateful entity on the other side of the IFC to send DIFI packets upstream to the converter. Therefore, Keysight provides two sides (downstream RF and upstream DIFI Ethernet) to the IFC. We will demo both an emulated downstream and an emulated upstream of raw DIFI data going back and forth through the converter. – Conclusions

Date: May 27, 2025 Time: 4:00 pm - 4:55 pm