Although virtualization is already an established concept in industries such as terrestrial communications, the space industry is now starting to catch up. There’s already tremendous innovation in the satellite sector from software-defined satellites to LEO mega-constellations, so what about the ground?
Virtualizing the ground segment offers a variety of benefits, as the World Teleport Association (WTA) “The Virtual Teleport” report explains. These benefits include reducing costs, improving flexibility and quality of service, as well as expanding geographic reach. This is also the foundation of the new Ground-Segment-as-a-Service (GSaaS) model, where antenna networks are remotely controlled and managed.
As a follow-on to the report, WTA Executive Director Robert Bell moderated a webinar featuring executives from both ground station and satellite operators, including KSAT, Speedcast, ATLAS Space Operations, and Kratos Defense, to give additional perspective on the advantages of virtualizing the ground.
Bell prefaced with how virtualization can reduce costs, while improving flexibility and quality of service. To further define the concept, Kratos Defense VP of Product Management Greg Quiggle explained that virtualization can mean different things to different people, but “one basic 101 definition is the process of taking application software and extracting it from dedicated hardware.”
Quiggle then gave an example specific to network virtualization: “Not that long ago if you bought a router or a switch for your network, it was application software that was running on purpose-built hardware. That's what allowed the network and the device to perform. Nowadays, the router and the switch are virtual applications, which means they've been abstracted from the custom hardware that allows the software to route and switch. They run in a generic compute environment, which is a fancy way of saying servers and that could be a public or private cloud. That abstraction of the software layer from the hardware layer is the basic definition of virtualization.”
With the definition out of the way, what new capabilities could virtualization bring? Much of it has to do with signal processing. Norwegian-based ground network provider KSAT CEO Katherine Monson sung the praises of virtualized GSaaS, explaining that newer software-defined radios allow KSAT to quickly adapt configuration to new use cases, as opposed to loading configuration files into the hardware-based radios of the past.
“It allows us to be very flexible and customized,” Monson added.
To keep up with the move from hardware to software, how much will the technology infrastructure need to change? “It comes down to unique applications,” Speedcast VP of Engineering Operations Will Mudge said. Moving software-defined resources to the cloud allows you to take advantage of the cloud provider’s resources. There will always be some amount of physical equipment at the teleport, but in some applications “the routers, the switches, the modems can go into a virtual stack, and then you can be hardware agnostic.”
Hardware agnosticism was a virtualization advantage a couple of panelists agreed on. ATLAS Space Operations Sean McDaniel said that “we’re seeing a shift towards more of a managed services type model in the ground segment as a service vertical … satellites in orbit no longer need to rely exclusively on the interdependency between the radio they’re flying and the radio on the ground. We can introduce a translation layer that moves the virtual environment towards being truly hardware agnostic.”
Other than the advantages discussed, why else should the ground virtualize? According to Quiggle, we don’t have a choice. “Much of it is driven by the innovation in the space layer. I’ve been on record of saying we’re in a ‘space renaissance.’ Look at the explosion in number of satellites, amount of bandwidth, number of beams … what doesn’t get talked about enough is the configurability of the satellite … we have all this great innovation at the space layer. If the ground doesn’t innovate, we’re going to hold the whole industry back.”
The bottom line is that virtualization offers a variety of benefits. The ground segment might be playing catch up with the space layer on the path to virtualization, but the space renaissance is just beginning.
The WTA’s The Virtual Teleport webinar went into further detail about how GSaaS differs from traditional teleports, new cloud service capabilities, and more. Watch the webinar here. To read more about how virtualization technologies are remarking teleport operations, explore the WTA’s The Virtual Teleport report here.
