6 minute read
Setting the standard for Digital Intermediate Frequency
As innovations in Digital Intermediate Frequency (DIF) continue, close collaboration between solutions providers is essential for establishing a new open standard.
Kevin Dunne, CEO ETL Systems
So fast is the pace of innovation in the NewSpace industry that it’s on track to be worth around $1.8 trillion by 2035 from the current $630 billion, according to the World Economic Forum. One of the biggest drivers for this is the booming IoT market, which is expected to be worth US$947.50 billion globally this year, and grow by almost 10.5 percent annually until 2029.
It’s great news for the organizations already using IoT and the many more that could benefit from it. Automotive, industrial and consumer sectors are among the most enthusiastic adopters of IoT but there’s set to be steady growth in areas like healthcare too.
The limitation on all this is bandwidth—at the moment, the ground segment doesn’t have the capacity to scale fast enough to satisfy such a rapid increase in demand. While the convergence of Radio Standards such as V/HTS multi-orbit satellites, Wi-Fi, 4G and 5G has been an important step forward, it is not enough by itself. Many in the space sector recognize these limitations, which is why interest in Digital Intermediate Frequency (DIF) has surged in recent years.
Bridging the gap between traditional RF technology and the virtualized ground segment, DIF offers similar benefits to the ones we’ve seen in broadcast and telecoms: better performance and scalability, and lower costs for the user. Distance is no longer a barrier either, since digital signals can be transported anywhere in the world using secure private IP networks. In comparison, RF signals transmitted over fiber start to degrade as soon as they are transmitted, and conditioning can only mitigate this degradation, not stop it completely.
DIF is particularly valuable in the defense and security sector, as it enables the antenna to be physically decoupled from the modem. Similarly, potentially targeted RF emissions can be located away from personnel, enhancing their security. Governments benefit from enhanced security because encryption equipment can be managed in home territory instead of in hostile environments. There are also efficiencies and cost-savings that come from removing the distributed network of modems, encoders and decoders, and maintaining everything in a single location instead. Digitization would also mean software can be reconfigured at need remotely, reducing the investment of time, manpower, and equipment required to achieve operational flexibility.
Interoperability Is Critical
If it hadn’t been for the introduction of a standard gauge railway system in the UK 180 years ago, it’s unlikely that the Industrial Revolution would have gained the momentum that it did. Today, in the New Space era, we’re facing similar questions about interoperability. Excitement about the opportunities space-based technologies bring is fueling innovation and investment, yet both are in danger of drying up unless there’s also greater certainty in the market. Specifically, we need an agreed open standard to ensure that solutions providers work together to avoid poor performance, vendor lock-in, and costly equipment (both hardware and software) becoming obsolete and incompatible with other systems.
There’s a fine balance to strike between being overly prescriptive and being too flexible: if solutions providers are too rigid in their approach then innovation may be dampened, yet trying to meet the needs of every possible use-case can mean they end up satisfying none. So what’s behind the lack of standardization?
The Digital Intermediate Frequency Interoperability (DIFI) Consortium points to the almost ‘infinite number of ways to encode digital IF bits into a standard IP packet’ –something that isn’t the case with analogue IF. It adds that, “standardization has not advanced beyond the framework level and cannot offer interoperability across vendor systems.” This, it warns, could halt the digital transformation of the ground segment.
ETL has taken a leading role in DIFI since January 2022 because we too recognize that standardization is critical to a strong and resilient satellite sector. We’re helping to shape the DIFI open, interoperable Digital IF Interoperability standard – and applying it to our own product development. Following an intensive R&D period, we are now able to support organizations who want to use DIF to translate analogue RF signals to digital and vice versa with our new DIF product, Genus Digital 5000.
Having been in this industry for more than 35 years, we know that change doesn’t happen overnight; analogue RF isn’t going to disappear in the short or even the medium term. We believe that interoperability should include compatibility with existing and legacy RF equipment. This approach enables organizations to turn investment in equipment like modems from CAPEX to OPEX, reducing both barriers to entry and the risk.
Laying The Groundwork
Also lowering the barrier to entry is the emergence of ground segment as a service (GSaaS), which allows users to access the ground station network on a pay-as-you-go basis. Standardization is crucial here too, enabling operators to plug in and downlink data from satellites in the most efficient and effective way possible. Two of the leading cloud providers, Microsoft Azure and Amazon AWS, are investing in technologies to support DIF. This is already starting to create new ecosystems of space solutions providers – for instance, the satellite telco SES has previously announced plans to co-locate four satellite ground stations at Microsoft data centers.
One of the best things about NewSpace is its diversity: the big global players rubbing shoulders with ambitious start-ups, and hardware and software solutions providers all working to solve some of the biggest global challenges we face. Along with defense and security, the technology could pave the way for highly accurate weather forecasting which has multiple applications, not least proactively monitoring climate-related events such as hurricanes.
Collaboration and strategic partnerships are now firmly embedded in NewSpace. What’s crucial is that they’re all working to agreed standards to halt any divergence and fragmentation that results in users being left with obsolete systems. There’s a clear commercial incentive for NewSpace companies to do this in order to future-proof their products, but there are social and ethical reasons too, particularly where the quality of the signal transmission could have a direct impact on human life. Fortunately, we are moving in the right direction. A number of standards are now in operation, including the European Cooperation for Space Standardization (ECSS) and the well-known ISO. Together with the DIF standard, these will ensure that the many technologies born of the New Space industry deliver here on Earth