Computer-Aided Payload Architecture Optimization for HTS Satellites

The current satellite market is going through a paradigm shift, moving towards flexibility and reconfigurability enabled by the advancements on payload components like onboard processors (OBPs), active antennas, photonics components, etc. In this emerging market need, the different satellite manufacturers are developing and researching different payload options to achieve flexibility via OBP, leading to a growing amount of different configurations to choose from when designing a satellite system. At the moment, the evaluation of the satellite system performance is usually specifically tailored to a given coverage and payload configuration, requiring a significant effort in the implementation and characterization of the target system before being able to get a performance estimate. This approach can provide a higher level of precision but limits the flexibility in the design by requiring a strict pre-selection of very few possible configurations to implement and test. This paper presents a software optimization tool aimed at estimating the system throughput in a fast parametric fashion, while taking into account different payload architectures. This tool, called SPATIAL, allows to perform a high level optimization of the payload, aimed at maximizing the system throughput while satisfying a set of platform constraints specified as input parameters. The assumptions and modelling behind SPATIAL are presented and then a limited set of example outputs are shown towards the end of the paper.