Herkea Jea, President and CEO of SatPath Systems, Inc,
In CommunicAsia 2011, SatPath introduced SkySwitch®, the first and only Packet Switch VSAT network in the satellite industry using MCPC/PSMA technology developed by SatPath engineers. “The VSAT industry faces challenges to provide high bit rate services with lower bandwidth consumption when Internet applications proliferated all over the world in the 90’s. The need for such a packet switching VSAT platform become obvious“, said Herkea Jea, President and CEO of SatPath Systems, Inc, a VSAT system manufacturer based in Silicon Valley.
IP packet switching became today’s de facto standards of digital network communication methods. Packet switching groups all transmitted data, regardless of content, type, or format, into blocks of variable bit-rate data streams. In a connectionless packet switching, also known as datagram switching, network each packet includes complete addressing or routing information and is routed individually. The connectionless communication mode of SkySwitch® has the advantage over a connection-oriented mode in that it has low overhead. It also allows for multicast and broadcast operations, which may save even more network resources when the same data needs to be transmitted to several recipients.
In contrast, traditional VSAT platforms are all based on connection-oriented point-to-point or point-to-multipoint links such as SCPC in FDMA or Time-Slots in TDMA. In connection-oriented network, communication peers must first establish a logical or physical data channel or “connection” preceding exchange of user data. Establishing connection channels requires bandwidth overhead for multiplexing format and thus increases operating cost and slows down traffic flow with longer processing latency.
In recognizing the need to improve transmission efficiency, SatPath engineers developed the SkySwitch® network based on the technology of Connectionless Packet Switching and applied it to the entire network design. Communication between any two nodes in SkySwitch® network does not require pre-arranged connection or link. There is no multiplexing framing overhead as used in traditional connection oriented network. Each SkySwitch’s smart-terminals come with embedded router that works collectively with Network Control Server (NCS) for traffic routing over satellite in the most efficient way of utilizing transponder bandwidth. In SkySwitch® network, nodes are always connected on-demand as configured by design and under NCS’s control. Traffic is always validated per designed network routing before it is put on satellite links. For the first time, SkySwitch® brought true sub-networking capability to VSAT industry and allows operator to configure each network’s structure based on connectivity requirements.
“We are very excited about the advanced technologies that are available to the satellite industry through SkySWitch®. We hope these new proprietary features will benefit today’s VSAT operators and they can experience Total Telecom VSAT Network performance”, added by Herkea and “to strengthen the whole industry’s position in telecom field.”
