Slot Clouds: Getting More from Orbital Slots with Networking

Operators of traditional geostationary satellites are allocated well-defined orbital slots for their satellites. By breaking the uplink/downlink dependency, adapting onboard processing in the transponders to decode to baseband, co-locating multiple satellites supporting a variety of different uplink and downlink frequencies, and enabling interfaces with networked communication between the satellites using intersatellite links, the variety of services that the satellites can support can be increased. This permits more flexible use of all available satellite capacity. We call this concept the 'slot cloud'. The co-located satellites in the orbital slot together form a network and, particularly when using and communicating with the Internet Protocol, can be viewed as a network 'cloud' that provides functionality in a flexible manner.