AccelerComm: Supercharging Satellite Networks

AccelerComm’s latest innovation is opening up the potential for a wide range of new and exciting 5G applications by improving the efficiency of low-earth orbit satellite communications. 

Constellations of 5G satellites will increasingly play a vital role in completing connectivity ecosystems, addressing critical challenges such as data speed and coverage limitations, while fulfilling the needs of emerging use cases. In particular, low-earth orbit (LEO) satellites offer significant benefits in a variety of scenarios, including safety-critical and military applications; narrowband communications direct to handsets or IoT devices; broadband connectivity for cars, aircraft, and ships; fixed broadband access for remote areas and as backup networks.

However, LEO satellites also pose unique considerations due to their distance and the speed at which they travel. LEO satellites are 1,000 km away, resulting in high path loss and round-trip delays of about 20 ms, and they move at about 7.5 km/second, causing challenges with frequency shift and timing. They also suffer from rapid fluctuations in signal amplitude and phase caused by atmospheric and weather effects. 

AccelerComm’s LEOPhy solution seeks to overcome these challenges. Benefits include improved error correction strength over long transmission ranges, reduced power consumption and simplification of aggregating data from multiple sources. It also reduces the chip area required by providing better hardware performance over alternative decoders.