This project will establish the potential gains from advanced adaptive satellite communication technologies. Highly flexible software defined radios have been very successful in enabling a wide variety of applications in terrestrial communications. Recently, the field of networking has been revolutionised by software defined networking allowing vastly more scope to network operators to define new services, reduce the system cost and enable inter-operability between heterogeneous satellite and terrestrial systems. There is enormous potential for these technologies to be applied to satellite systems.

This includes Software Defined Networking (SDN) solutions to centralise the orchestration of the whole network, the control and sharing of the network resources, implementations of intelligent Software Defined Radio (SDR) transponders and user terminals with machine learning technologies, advanced digital multibeam precoding, dynamic control of multi-spot beam patterns and distributed computing tasks based on traffic conditions and QoS requirements. The project will engage relevant researchers from industry and academia to establish which elements are the key factors and bottlenecks in delivering gains from next generation satellites.