ESA Open Invitation to Tender: 1-11165
Open Date: 21/09/2022 16:40 CEST
Closing Date: 16/12/2022 13:00 CEST

The objective of the activity is to design, develop and test standardised ground software components to control, manage and share resources of a fleet of flexible high throughput satellites among multi-vendor service operators and service providers.Targeted Improvements:- increase the uptime of satellite service at least by a factor of 2,- facilitate the integration of the satellite into other communication networks and provide flexibility for selecting different satellite networks of different vendorsDescription:The new generation of high throughput satellites offer by design flexibility in assigning resources such as beam coverage, bandwidth, power and time to multiple services. These flexibilities pave the way to host a variety of services sharing the same high throughput satellite resources in a timely and dynamic manner without the need of fixed reservation. The need for network function virtualisation has already been recognised in the management and operation of satellite networks. Software defined sub-systems are replacing custom hardware solutions to allow more flexible and agile satellite network management systems interfacing with the external service operators. Concepts such as network slicing and service orchestration have already become essential part of many satellite network ecosystems. Despite the recent progress in virtualisation of the satellite network functions, there is a lack of common protocol that allows seamless integration of different high throughput satellite and multiple service providers. The main target of the activities to design, develop and test a common set of standardised ground software components for orchestrating high throughput satellite services that can be readily deployed by satellite operators to offer and integrate the satellite services to a variety of market sectors, service operators and multiple vendors in a fully dynamic manner. The activity will also include a development of a software interface for orchestration and verification of high throughput satellite data services according to open standards.

Directorate: Directorate Telecom Integrated Applica
Estabilishment: ESTEC
ECOS Required: No
Classified: No
Price Range: > 500 KEURO
Authorised Contact Person: Nathalie Dorval
Initiating Service: TIA-TTG
IP Measure: N/A
Prog. Reference: E/0534-01G - CC-AT 4.0.1
Tender Type: Open Competition
Open To Tenderers From: AT+BE+CA+CH+CZ+DE+DK+GR+ES+FI+FR+GB+HU+IE+IT+LU+NL+NO+PL+PT+RO+SE
Technology Keywords: 6-A-III-Networking Techniques