Channel and Interference adaptive SATCOM Digital beam-former

ABSTRACT: The vulnerability of satellite assets to enemy jamming has led to an increased urgency to develop SATCOM payloads capable of maintaining high aggregate throughput even in challenged environments. As the size, cost, and power consumption of digital signal processing platforms continue to drop and their performance improves, incorporating digital beamformer (DBF) designs into future SATCOM satellite payloads has become an increasingly attractive solution to this challenge. The flexibility of digital beamforming permits the creation of multiple independent antenna patterns that can be designed for wideband systems. In response to the Air Force solicitation, MaXentric is developing an adaptive digital beamforming system codenamed SABER (Satellite Adaptive Beamforming aRray). MaXentrics Phase I focused on simulating critical adaptive beamforming algorithms while reviewing the system trade space. The proposed Phase II effort will focus on constructing a hardware test platform for algorithm implementation and testing. BENEFIT: SABER Phase 2 HW prototype provides a fully functional HW implementation of the SABER architecture envisioned in Phase 1. It will enable MaXentric to implement the various flexible, power efficient algorithms for beam-forming and channel equalization developed and analyzed in Phase 1. MaXentric Phase 2 approach emphasizes the need for commercializing the SABER platform by building a Phase II prototype that has enough flexibility and functionality to be utilized in many other government and private sector applications such as phased array radars and sensing, MIMO transceivers targeted for SIGINT or wireless/cellular communications and general purpose DSP boards used for complex and demanding wide-band signal processing tasks.