NASA Lewis Meshed VSAT Workshop meeting summary
NASA Lewis Research Center's Space Electronics Division (SED) hosted a workshop to address specific topics related to future meshed very small-aperture terminal (VSAT) satellite communications networks. The ideas generated by this workshop will help to identify potential markets and focus technology development within the commercial satellite communications industry and NASA. The workshop resulted in recommendations concerning these principal points of interest: the window of opportunity for a meshed VSAT system; system availability; ground terminal antenna sizes; recommended multifrequency for time division multiple access (TDMA) uplink; a packet switch design concept for narrowband; and fault tolerance design concepts. This report presents a summary of group presentations and discussion associated with the technological, economic, and operational issues of meshed VSAT architectures that utilize processing satellites.