The authors discuss many satellite communications systems and technology concepts that can be expected by the year 2000. Challenges and changes that are taking place in the commercial market place are discussed. Technology advances that promise to enable future communications satellites to capture their share of the future marketplace are discussed. Current, near-term, and far-term technologies are discussed.>

This paper concentrates on the control of individual burst transmissions of traffic and reference stations in TDMA and SS/ TDMA networks. In a TDMA system, the principal task of a TDMA terminal is to transmit each burst at the proper time to assure that, at the satellite, the burst resides in its assigned location in the TDMA frame. The composite of assigned positions for all bursts in the TDMA frame, or frames if more than one transponder is involved, is called the burst time plan. The paper discusses a specific concept of control used by a station to acquire and synchronize its burst transmission to assigned time slot(s) in the TDMA frame. The concept is applied to single-beam (global or regional) and muitibeam systems. The method used controls the instant of traffic burst transmission by introducing a time delay at each station which causes the round-trip propagation time between the satellite and all earth stations to be equal for burst position control purposes. This time delay is simple to implement in the TDMA terminal's timing circuitry and does not require the storage of traffic to accomplish it. It is also shown that the control method leads to a simple means for accomplishing synchronous burst time plan changes throughout the network. The functions of the reference stations needed to accomplish the burst time plan control are defined and explained. The discussion extends to SS/TDMA, and explains how the satellite switch state time plan change can be synchronized to the overall network burst time plan change.

This paper presents an optimal control procedure for an on-board oscillator which provides basic switching and processing timing on the satellite. Alternate methods of measuring oscillator drift are described, and a linear discrete optimization model is developed. The optimum system minimizes a long-term phase error for any possible oscillator drift satisfying a certain constraint. The proposed on-board clock control scheme requires only a voltage-controlled oscillator on board and has a number of advantages over other methods.

This paper describes a speech predictive encoding communications (SPEC) system that is designed to accommodate the traffic ofNPCM telephone trunks in the capacity ofN/2PCM telephone channels. The system exploits the statistics of multichannel voice communication in a manner significantly different from the technique employed in the well-known time-assignment speech interpolation (TASI) system. Specifically, the SPEC system operates at the transmitter by removing redundant speech samples during talk bursts as well as during silence intervals. The receiver remembers the most recent sample transmitted through each channel. As long as a new sample is not transmitted, the receiver simply repeats the sample value stored in its memory. Each sample from each incoming trunk is examined every 125 μs to determine which samples must be transmitted and which are redundant. Because the SPEC system operates at this high speed and predicts redundant or missing samples at the receiver, it does not produce the speech clipping effects typical of TASI-like systems. Any voice-quality degradation due to increased call load and/or speech activity is manifested as an increase in noise power. The subjective result is a graceful degradation that is virtually imperceptible to the listener.