Subscribe
Share
Share
Embed
The Space Industry by satsearch - sharing stories about the businesses taking us into orbit.
We delve into the opinions and expertise of the people behind the commercial space companies of today, who could become the household names of tomorrow. Find out more about the companies and technologies discussed on this show at satsearch.com.
Host (Narayan):
Hi and welcome to The Space Industry podcast by satsearch. My name is Narayan, COO at satsearch, and I'll be your host as we journey through the space industry. The space sector is going through some seismic changes, promising to generate significant impact for life on Earth and enable humans to sustain life elsewhere in the cosmos. At satsearch, we work with buyers and suppliers across the globe marketplace, helping to accelerate missions through our online platform.
Based on our day-to-day work supporting commercial activity, my aim here during this podcast is to shed light on the boots-on-the-ground developments across the globe that are helping to foster and drive technical and commercial innovation. So come join me as we delve into a fascinating, challenging, and ultimately inspiring sector.
Hi and welcome back to yet another episode of The Space Industry podcast. Today we have here with us Hans Martin Steiner, who is the VP of Institutional Space Business at Terma Space. And today we're actually going to be discussing the theme of scalability and expandability with Software-Defined Radio technology for ground stations in the space industry. Firstly, Hans Martin, thank you so much for taking the time to speak with us, and welcome to The Space Industry podcast.
Guest (Hans Martin):
Thank you for having me.
Host (Narayan):
Great. So, this is a very important and timely topic, as I see it, because as they say today, software is eating the world, including the space industry. And Software-Defined Radios (SDRs) have become a very important theme in the space industry for the last 10 to 15 years, at least. And obviously, SDR technology is not just relevant for space as an onboard satellite or launch vehicles, but also on the ground with ground stations.
So, traditionally, ground stations have relied heavily on physical modems, where scaling means adding more boxes in the end. So, from your perspective, how does the software-defined nature of the SDR modems fundamentally reshape this model? And then, as a follow-up to that, what do you see as the biggest economic and operational wins when this shift happens?
Guest (Hans Martin):
The simple answer is, it's going to reshape it fundamentally from my perspective. And let me dig into it a little bit more. In the traditional way, as you see the ground stations and ground segment at the moment, you have these kind of what the community actually coined the term "stovepipes." And these are dedicated hardware chains, including the modem, of course, that are pure hardware โ a little bit of software โ but very difficult to handle and very dedicated to one single satellite or, let's say, one mission.
SDR, on the other hand, is going to change this fundamentally, because it's actually really reshaping the whole model. You are introducing software, and software in this context replaces the hardware. And if you introduce software into the topic, into the arena, of course, you come immediately into the IT world. The IT world has been around us for an extremely long time already. You have all the good things and some bad things, but the good things, of course, can all be exploited using this SDR technology. Then you take also the network capabilities that you have right now, plus the software capabilities, and then you come up with an extremely nice, potentially new world of looking at the things.
So, no longer one mission, one hardware, but one hardware or one infrastructure, multiple missions. And once you're in the software, of course, software is easier scalable, it is maintainable โ it's easier to maintain โ whereas, of course, hardware can fail. Of course, software can fail as well, but hardware you have to repairโyou have to come with a screwdriver and fix it. Software, you can do a remote repair, for instance. It is extremely flexible and, after all, reconfigurable. And I think this is really an important thing.
At the end of the day, since it's software, again, you can also introduce flexible licenses, license schemes, and so on. So, all the benefits that you have with the software can be exploited, and this gives you the economic win. Operational wins, on the other hand, as I said, remote maintenance, scalability, and really remote access to your infrastructure. All this gives you, as I said before, reshapes the community and reshapes the market. It's going to reshape, it's not yet there fully, but it's going to reshape the market and will give us these economic and operational wins.
Host (Narayan):
And the keyword that you mentioned there is also flexibility, and this is the promise of software in the end, right? And when it comes to the parameters that are involved in radios themselves, there are several key parameters such as playing around with frequencies, or bandwidth, or modulation schemes, and these are some of the things that satellite operators and even ground station operators need to play around with, right? And the promise of SDR technology is obviously to provide some flexibility over the lifetime of a mission as also satellites themselves evolve with their communication needs. So, why do you think this kind of flexibility is important for things like optimizing spectrum use or even things like mitigating interference, which is possible?
Guest (Hans Martin):
If you look at the way how we see it at Terma Space, and also with our product, which we call Spectra, we propose, for instance, a very split architecture. So, of course, you still have hardware in the background, even if it is a Software-Defined Radio, because RF at the signal is still a physical element. So, you cannot escape RF; RF will always be some physical elements in it. So, you have to go to the point where you have to use the least hardware - this can be, for instance, down converters and digitizers โ and this is what we do. We place these limited hardware, limited in terms of functionality, but limited in terms of number of hardware and hardware installations, close to the antenna. And close to the antenna, then you do all the hardware and physical things there, and once you have digitized the signal, you transport it by all meansโvia the network, via Ethernet, via TCP/IPโin terms of software and digitized signals to wherever you want it.
And then, of course, once you are in software, you can do a lot of things that you just mentioned. Like, you can remotely change the modulation, you can change the coding, you can change filtering, you change the framing, you change the protocol. So, you are really free to do whatever you want once you are in the software world. Compare it now again to the old-fashioned hardware world, if you want to change a protocol, it's pretty difficult. Yes, you could say there's a software stack also in a hardware, but it's very cumbersome, very unflexible in order to do this. Or the modulation scheme, introduce a new modulation scheme, you have to change the FPGA maybe or the DSP on the board. Software-Defined Radio really gives us all this flexibility and also to allow these dynamic changes that you have just mentioned and I have mentioned before.
You were talking also about optimization of spectrum and spectrum and interference. Also here, of course, SDR is going to help us enormously, because at the moment, the spectrum is always a very scarce resource. And these resources have to be managed and, of course, used in a very good way in order to optimize the utilization of the spectrum and the maximum utilization of the spectrum. And Software-Defined Radio, you can have the overview, and instead of again applying and imposing hardware on top of it, you are very free and flexible to change the beam forming. And if you have the SDR, you mentioned it also, on the satellite as well as on the ground systems, so once the satellite changes the beam or switches the beam or makes beam hopping or the beam shaping or uses a different waveform, the ground can follow easily - not as it is right now, you have to go there, reconfigure, put new hardware in - you easily reconfigure your whole ground equipment in an instance of a second. And this gives the really the flexibility in order to optimize the spectrum.
Finally, I think you mentioned also interference, which is a nuisance in the industry, as we know it, not only in the military world, but also defense world, but also in the commercial world. And also here, flexibility comes in. You can just simply reconfigure what you do if you hit interference. First, you detect it, but, of course, you have to mitigate it. Mitigation can mean you switch to another ground station, you switch to another antenna, you change the frequency, or you put up the power. So, all this, of course, the ground segment has always to follow what you do on the spacecraft, and then SDR comes in handy. And again, with the flexibility and the reconfigurability that the software offers to us, it's perfectly fine.
Last statement on this interference: anti-jamming is, of course, very important. You can do, one of the methods is, for instance, signal cancellation. And if you introduce signal cancellation, of course, you can do it also via hardware chains, but then again, you are fixed to one single chain. SDR again allows you to do, not in all cases, but in limited cases, or more limited than the usual cases right now, to really do anti-jamming techniques. It can be introduced into the software that actually allows you to tweak the signal and actually clean it from jamming. It's not possible in all cases, but in lots of cases.
Host (Narayan):
And from the sense of where the industry is heading, we're really heading towards a lot of the ground station operators also providing services as a commercial service operator, right? So, where they are probably working with tens of different satellite operators to then provide services, and obviously, SDR technology becomes one of the key aspects that they probably need to evaluate, given that the investment in hardware itself is very significant when it comes to such a service, given the kind of investment that is needed to set up a ground station service. So, from an SDR contribution to this particular angle, are we seeing any trend specifically towards shared or even multi-mission ground station models because SDR is providing this kind of flexibility to them?
Guest (Hans Martin):
You're actually mentioning a very important buzzword: Ground Segment as a Service (GSaaS). I think it will dominate the future ground segment business. Let's look at it from two perspectives. One perspective is, of course, the provider of the service, and the other one is the consumer of the service. So, providers of the service could be, or are in the moment, operators that have already the infrastructure.
I compare this like you, like the industry was a couple of years ago with the cloud computing, cloud deployments. Cloud computing came into existence because the resources were there and they were not fully utilized. So, put this model now to the ground segment. Ground segment resources are there, the antennas, the RF chains, the digitizers, all is there, but they are not fully utilized. So, this, first of all, the provider of this ground segment, they can just offer their infrastructure, if they have no need to use it for their own purposes, in order to offer it to the community and, of course, on the market practically, in order to offer this, let's say the antenna, as a service. So, that there is a downlink available, somebody schedules it, and then you make this antenna for the 10 minutes or whatever available in order to get the downlink from this satellite. I think this is a great model also for utilizing, fully utilizing, operators' models.
On the other hand, you look at the consumer of the services. The consumers are at the moment, they call the operator and ask the operator to do something. But if you offer this as a service, then, of course, it's available. You have all the internet services, so there's no need in order to call anybody. You just subscribe to a service on the Internet, via the cloud, via the infrastructure, and then you also tell the service, "Okay, I need again a downlink," and then the resources are allocated for you. And why is this important for instance, small companies and also consumers that do not have their own infrastructure? Because they save a lot of money. So, they don't have to put in the costs, the CapEx, in order to build up their own ground segment, because it's there; it is already there. And this, I think, is a trend and is going to be absolutely a trend for the years to come, and that really you consume services that are offered. It can be the full service in terms of, "Okay, give me the downlink, store the data, archive the data, process the data, and then pick up the data later." Or it can only be, "Give me the modem as a service," or "Give me the spectrum analyzer as a service." So, you can imagine all kinds of things, and all this is made possible by SDR.
On top of that, just a final statement, on top of that, if you think of virtualization, so take it a level higher. So, SDR is already around, but it's in bits and pieces, but if all this is coherent, I call it virtualization of the ground segment, then it becomes even more important. And I can imagine new business models become really available. They are already available and will become available, and they will proliferate through the industry.
Host (Narayan):
And you did touch upon virtualization of the ground segment as one of the key themes, and obviously we are talking about everything software-defined here. And when it comes to these topics, one of the key areas that we have to talk about is cybersecurity, given the vulnerabilities that exist, right? And so, as ground station networks become more and more software-defined, there are going to be obviously cybersecurity challenges that are emerging. So, can you briefly touch upon what are the unique cybersecurity challenges that come to the top of your mind? And then, what best practices or standards are essential to secure data flows for mission operations?
Guest (Hans Martin):
You're absolutely right. With IT and software, also the cyber threats come along. And SDR or these environments that we just talked about before are not an exception. And this is unfortunately bad, but fortunately, you can do something about it. You asked me what methods could be, and let me just first see these things, and just as an example, not a concrete example, but we know in the past that denial-of-service attacks and, for instance, these kinds of things are happening, are currently happening, and will be happening. So, you cannot actually forbid these things because they will happen.
And if you look at the infrastructure, fortunately, the modem is one of the weaker links, if not the weakest link in this chain, because if you are able to actually hack the modem or come somehow into the modem, you can monitor, which is the least, monitor the traffic between the ground station and the spacecraft and the data back and the telemetry back. But even worse, you could actually change the traffic. So, at the end of the day, you could take over potentially satellites. Cybersecurity threats are a real, real threat in the community, and they are, they have been, and they will be.
So, what can be done? We at Terma have as a philosophy "Cybersecurity by Design". So, we start already with the cybersecurity thinking to design it into the SDR, respectively, with this what we have done with our modem, which is called the Spectra modem, and we have applied also this principle: "Cybersecurity by Design". And because it is important, because if you do cybersecurity afterwards, look at the internet, the internet was not designed as a secure system to communicate. Then, on top of that, you had to put in a lot of security things, but you had to put it on top of it later on. And then you will always find vulnerabilities that you have not thought of because it's put on top of it later. So, we have already done this from the beginning. We have thought cybersecurity into our SDR and our modem.
So, for instance, one thing is encryption of the traffic in both ways, of course. So, you encrypt what has to be sent to the satellite, and, of course, you encrypt also the things that you have to receive from the satellite. So, you have the encryption units on the ground; you have to have encryption units on the spacecraft. Then, of course, you come in with key management, and these things are basically solved because this is not new to the community, cyber threats in IT and intrusions in IT. So, encryption is already very well handled, also key distribution is very well handled. Well, in the future, potentially quantum key distribution comes in, but I don't want to talk about it because I'm not an expert about this one.
But then, of course, you do authentication, authorization. These kinds of things are very important. However, all this, we summarize under a specific term: we call it, and not only we, but the community calls it, the Zero Trust principle. And we have introduced the Zero Trust principle also in our modem, actually in all our software that we do. We do also, apart from the modem, we do also ground segment, other ground segment software, like mission control, flight dynamics, and mission planning. So, all these software modules are on the way to be a Zero Trust principle-driven platform.
And coming back to the modem, what does it mean for Zero Trust principles? And this, I think, is the thing you were asking for: main principle, "never trust, always verify." Really, "never trust, always verify". Because why? Because threats, they can be inside or outside your network. So, you can have internal intruders, as well as external ones. The external ones are the more obvious ones, but also you do not trust your own internal resources. So, always "never trust, always verify".
You do a strict identity verification, and you do always authorization. So, is the user or the device or the application, is it authorized to do what it wants to do? Then, we apply always the Least Privilege Access principle. Least Privilege Access means you give actually no rights, or only the minimum rights, to access resources. And this is not only true for users, but this is also true for devices and also for applications. And then the last one, but not the least, you continuously authenticate and authorize. So, you always look, "Who wants to access resources?" and then you do, "Ah, is the user, let's say, in this context or the device allowed to do this or not?" And at the end of the day, this is then called the Zero Trust platform.
Host (Narayan):
We always end the podcast by doing a little bit of future thinking, I would say. And obviously, here we are looking at the future of SDRs and ground station ecosystems, right? There are broad themes here, when it comes to the future, as far as I can see. Obviously, one of the themes is the buzzword that is going on everywhere, which is AI, and the role of AI in the SDR ecosystem in the end. And the other is possibly things like optical ground stations, which are now emerging because of the higher data rates and again, encryption and other kinds of benefits that come along there, which is a parallel community that is being built against the traditional RF community that is out there, right? And obviously, everyone wants everything to be cheaper, faster, and easier in the future, right? When you take these broad themes, there's a lot to unravel here when it comes to what can happen in the next 5 to 10 years, right? What do you see happening, as somebody who has seen this theme for quite a while, as to what can happen in the next 5 to 10 years?
Guest (Hans Martin):
Okay. Let me start with a quote. I am Austrian, by the way, and there's, at least in Austria, a famous author, he said, "[redictions are difficult, specifically if they concern the future." But still, let me try. I've talked a little bit about, let's say, this upscaling, so the stepwise approach. So, we came from local, very mission-focused, single mission-focused implementations. Now we are going a bit more into the cloud, onto virtualization, and eventually, I have not used the term so far, we end up hopefully with Software-Defined Networks. Meaning they are software-driven or are regulated and can be configured via software, and only the least hardware is used with it. So, this is the step, at least from the technology point of view, where we are heading to. So, by far, we are not yet there at the Software-Defined Network, but I see this as a, let's say, final goal, but definitely a trend that more and more Software-Defined Radio, specifically software, is introduced into the ground segment to make it more flexible.
What else makes it happen? And this is already a reality, but it's becoming even more reality: standardization. So, standardization is very important in all areas of industry and also, of course, in our industry, very important, because standardizations make growth and also proliferation of technologies happen, and also new business models happen. And we have one standard, specifically one standard, that is actually is defined at the moment, respectively, there's already something out there. It's this DIFI Standard. DIFI stands for Digital Intermediate Frequency Interoperability, so it's exactly the standard, respectively, the methods that I was talking about a couple of minutes ago, that really digitize RF signals, and then you have it in, in digital form, and then you can do whatever you want from the digital perspective with it. And so, this is why I consider this DIFI Standard extremely important and standardization in general, extremely important. Just as one possible outcome and one positive thing is that you prevent, at the end of the day, vendor lock-in. So, if you have open standards, anybody can contribute with applications, services, and so on. And I think this is also the way to go, and I think this is the way it will be.
Plus, of course, we shall not neglect advancements in IT in general, which are independent basically of our community and our industry, like networks, clouds, and all this infrastructure. They are not made specifically for space and for the ground segment, but all these things, of course, can be used and can be reused. And if you consider, and again a comparison to the past, if you look at the Telco industry about 20 years ago, they were at the same point. And yes, true, we are late in space. If you again look at the Telco industry, they have already invented a lot of things. I think we shall adopt some of the models of the Telco industry, and I think the digital transformation of the satellite industry is currently happening, and it is a similar revolution that we had with the Telco industry, as I said, about 20 years ago. And SDR, at the end of the day, from my perspective, will play a very considerable role.
Now, you mentioned AI as well. That's a tricky part, AI. I can just guess again. I think AI will not be an enabler, or let's say SDR is not the enabler for AI, but I think rather a combination of AI and SDR is going to revolutionize also the ground segment industry. Why? Because what AI can bring in is intelligent analysis, automated decision-making, and predictive capabilities of AI. And while I was talking before on the flexibility and the reconfigurability, so far there are still humans behind it. They reconfigure because they know it has to be reconfigured and then use the flexibility of the Software-Defined Radio. But in the future, I see that AI will more or less take over these tasks and relieve the operators from, let's say, more important tasks, but still relieve the operators in order. So, reconfigurations will happen quasi automatically. And how could this, can this be employed?
Let me give you some examples, like signal identification and classification is quite important in the defense arena. That you identify, "Okay, what kind of signal are you dealing with? How can you classify it? What kind of modulation is it? Is it a, from where does it come from?" And so, all these kinds of things. So, that's, and this is called spectrum monitoring in general, and then out of this spectrum monitoring, you have this identification. And this is coming up, and I think will proliferate. And AI, together with SDR, I think can help a lot in order to actually make this even easier and more important.
And, of course, also this adaptive communication systems. I think I mentioned before that if the satellite changes the beam, puts more power in it, changes the frequency, of course, the ground segment has to follow up. At the moment, again, this would be more a manual task, although supported by SDR and by the software, but in the future, of course, an AI can detect, "Ah, there are some changes," or effectively communication is done, and then you have these very dynamic environments, and then you really can change faster, and the adoption, adaptation of the system to the reality becomes faster. And I think AI will be able to help us.
Finally, I think a term that we have not yet mentioned, but I want to introduce here is the Cognitive Radio Network. So, really put the AI to the maximum of its capability and use SDR on the one hand to serve as a replacement of hardware, as I explained it before, and use the AI, of course, for all these cognitive capabilities to make decisions. And all this combined together, I think will give us a future that will build up, or will give us new economics. We will see new players, we will see new business models, and we will see a totally different ground segment as you see it right now.
Host (Narayan):
Great. That is an excellent conclusion to this particular topic that we were discussing. So, for anybody who's out there who's interested more in the products that I mentioned, it's all going to be in a link below in the podcast episode for you to then find more about Terma and its capabilities.
Hans Martin, thank you so much for taking the time this morning to giving us such a great overview of this particular topic, and as we discussed, it's a very timely and an interesting topic for everyone in the industry, given the connection between the space and the ground.
Guest (Hans Martin):
Narayan, thank you very much, and thank you again for having me.
Host (Narayan):
Thanks for joining me today for another exciting story from the space industry. If you have any comments, feedback, or suggestions, please feel free to write to me at info@satsearch.com. And if you're looking to either speed up your space mission development or showcase your capabilities to a global audience, check out our marketplace at satsearch.com.
In the meantime, go daringly into the cosmos. Till the next time we meet.