On board switching for multimedia

The incoming generation of communication satellites has to manage a lot of different services. The traffic carried by these systems will be of different nature: from e-mail to basic telephony, to Internet access. video broadcasting. A set of constellations have been proposed, but the common denominator is multispot technology with on board switching. These new satellite techniques demand switching capabilities compared to that of a large terrestrial switching office, and at the same time, flexibility in adaptation evolving specifications during the system definition. Laben, a Finmeccanica Company. thanks to the experience gained during the development of previous on board processing equipments, proposes an architecture applicable to the two main switching techniques, circuit and packet switching. characterised by a core that can satisfy different requirements with minor modifications. This paper identifies the "switching needs" of the main foreseen services. Then possible architecture's are analysed and a trade off performed. The redundancy aspect is a critical one in space application. due to budget constraints. A graceful degradation approach has been investigated. The main criticality's have been highlighted. A glance to the evolution of on board switching concludes the paper.