MLDesign Technologies, Inc.

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SatLab- environment models and trajectory generators

An Overview

SatLab is a software laboratory for mission and system level design, animation, and analysis of wireless mobile communication and navigation systems. SatLab models the dynamics of communication nodes (orbits of satellites, trajectories of cars, ships and aircraft) and the environment (terrain, propagation effects, blocking, coverage). Together with its SatCom library, SatLab can be used to perform mission and system level design trade-offs and animations for

  • Global Mobile Personal Communications by Satellite (GMPCS),
  • Mobile terrestrial communication systems,
  • Satellite-based navigation systems,
  • Doppler and availability information for RF and handover design,
  • Integrated navigation and communication systems, and
  • System design of earth observation satellites.

SatLab system models may include satellites, fixed earth stations, and moving vehicles/persons (ground, air, and water).

SatLab is tightly integrated with our modeling and design tool MLDesigner. Custom interfaces and SatLabs SatCom design library ensure seamless integration. This tight integration supports integrated design flows covering the 14 orders of magnitude from global satellite systems to silicon.

Mission architectural models describe the flow of energy and information (transactions) through various system elements: the mission trajectory, the mission environment (e.g., terrain, atmospheric effects, availability of solar energy), system architectural components (e.g., CPU, memory, queues, power system, power and communication buses), and communication system components (e.g., transmitters, antennas, and receivers.) A mission architectural model simulation can generate performance metrics such as coverage, availability, bandwidth, response time, throughput, utilization, error probability as well as power generation and use. The results can be used to perform sizing trade-offs of system components--from orbits and gateway planning to channel bandwidth and memories for mission level requirements--to achieve the best performance at the least cost. The SatLab terrain and channel models support mission architectural tradeoff analyses which previously could only be done with on-site tests. Performing these trade-off analyses and making these design decision early in the design cycle minimizes later surprises, saving time and money.

The very high simulation speed of SatLab supports simulations of GMPCS systems with thousands of satellites and users distributed around the globe, permitting channel sizing and realistic interference analysis with other GMPCS systems based on realistic traffic scenarios. Combined with MLDesigner network models, SatLab supports analysis of integrated mobile terrestrial and mobile satellite communication systems like UMTS/IMT2000.

The animation capabilities of SatLab with views from space, from earth and in 3D terrain enable fast visual analysis of complex couplings in global communication and navigation systems and may be used both to better understand the complex relationships and to debug the simulations.