Elbit Systems of America, LLC

Iridium Satellite LLC

Charles Woloszynski

Qingyuan Dai

Jeffrey Francis Bull

George Xenakis

Hermon Pon

Alden Joe Fuchs

Gregory N Smith

Bryan Berezdivin

In one implementation, a communications satellite includes a main antenna system and a communications controller. The main antenna system is configured to send communications to and receive communications from one or more terrestrial terminal devices. The communications controller has a memory storing a plurality of terminal attribute sets, each of which specifies attributes for communicating with a corresponding class of terrestrial terminal devices. The communications controller is configured to receive a terminal class identifier from an active terrestrial terminal device, identify, from among the stored terminal attribute sets, a particular terminal attribute set as corresponding to the terminal class identifier received from the active terrestrial terminal device, and control the communications satellite to communicate with the active terrestrial terminal device according to the attributes for communicating specified in the particular terminal attribute set identified as corresponding to the terminal class identifier received from the active terrestrial terminal device.

Satellite communications with multiple classes of terrestrial terminal devices

In one implementation, an antenna array has a plurality of antenna element, each of which is configured to apply a phase shift to a signal. A beam steering controller is configured to steer a main beam of the antenna by controlling the phase shifts applied by the antenna elements. In addition, the beam steering controller also is configured to detect a failure of an antenna element and, in response to detecting the failure, disable the failed antenna element and modify the phase shifts applied by remaining ones of the antenna elements.

Wireless communication terminal

A method including receiving at a synchronizing node a first reference frame from a first reference node at a first time and storing a first time value representing the first time, and calculating a timing estimator by subtracting a minimum time value, representing the distance from the synchronizing node to the first reference node, from the first time value. The method includes receiving at the synchronizing node a second reference frame at a second time and transmitting from the synchronizing node to the first reference node a short timing contention time frame. The method includes receiving at the synchronizing node from the first reference node an arrival time value representing the time at which the first reference node received the short timing contention frame and calculating a time drift from the first arrival time value and the second time value and adjusting the timing estimator based on the time drift.

MIMO slotted aloha (MSA) system

A communications system includes one or more antennas and a receiver coupled to the one or more antennas. The one or more antennas are operable to receive a signal transmitted from a transmitter. The receiver includes a combiner that is operable to combine the signals received by the one or more antennas into a combined signal. The signal received by the receiver is a single-carrier waveform comprising a signal field and one or more data fields after the signal field. The signal field indicates a modulation technique of the one or more data fields. The one or more data fields include a first short unique word, a data payload after the second short unique word, and a second short unique word after the data payload.

Single carrier waveform system with frequency domain equalization

A wireless network protocol employs a hop-by-hop block formation approach in which data packets are organized into data blocks at each hop according to a routing table and are transmitted to each hop as data blocks. For example, data packets to be transmitted from a source node to a destination are grouped into a data block associated with a routing table. The source node transmits the data packets according to the routing table. Each node in the routing table determines which data packets it must transmit to other nodes to complete transmission of the data packets to the destination. Each such node determines a new routing table and groups these data packets into a new data block associated with the new routing table. Each node transmits the data packets of the new data block according to the new routing table in a manner similar to the source node.

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Vienna, VA, United States of America

Charles Woloszynski