ND SatCom Announces Major SKYWAN 5G VSAT Platform Upgrade

Immenstaad, Germany, July 20, 2016 – ND SatCom announces major SKYWAN 5G VSAT Platform Upgrade. The newest upgrade - Virtual Channel Group (VCGr) - advances the SKYWAN 5G satellite router’s Virtual Routing and Forwarding (VRF) function with innovative satellite bandwidth management capabilities. VCGr delivers the toolset for service providers and network operators to use valuable satellite bandwidth with utmost efficiency while maintaining service guarantees for user and application groups.

Bandwidth management is clearly a complex and evolving issue for most, if not all, network operators around the globe. Traffic growth coming from new services, more users or applications with higher bandwidth and/or lowest jitter requirements (e.g., HD/UHD video or 3G/LTE mobile traffic) are stretching network capabilities. All data packets sent on the multi-service network utilize the same resource pool and when congestion occurs, any packet can be dropped or delayed.

SKYWAN 5G satellite routers provide easy methods to manage network resources and link characteristics to give precedence to selected network traffic, thus delivering better service for a successful end-to-end business solution.

  • Virtual Networking - enables secure operation of up to 8 user groups over the same network.
  • Quality of Service – ensures applications are prioritized according to DiffServ.

Each SKYWAN 5G can be set up with several VRF instances, each utilizing completely independent IP address plans, networking stacks, network interfaces, routing protocols and individual QoS forwarding rules. VRFs are used to segment the SKYWAN 5G satellite network into virtual private networks for various user or application groups using the same platform.

  • Virtual Channel Group – provides bandwidth to virtual networks, manages the physical link to ensure the defined committed information rates (CIR) per user group and provides excess bandwidth on top.
  • Group Level CIR – provides guaranteed service levels per user or application group
  • Shared bandwidth resource – enables access to peak rates beyond Group Level CIR

The new VCGr ensures that a committed bandwidth threshold is not violated by other user groups’ traffic. Operator-defined traffic profiles are enforced with the committed threshold. Whether a user group network can access shared bandwidth or not is easily controlled by configuration.

With the VCGr upgrade, service providers can offer their customers virtual SCPC links in one SKYWAN network.

“The benefit for both user and application groups is that individual service guarantees (CIR) given per group are complemented by excess speed from the commonly shared bandwidth resource. Each group in its VRF experiences its own MF-TDMA network but will benefit from sharing some satellite bandwidth as an extra bonus” says Helmut Jäckle, product manager SKYWAN. ”Another VCGr advantage is that it further increases the SKYWAN 5G VSAT platform efficiency in bandwidth utilization at reduced OPEX and setup times for the operator.”

This new VCGr software release is upgradeable to all SKYWAN 5G satellite routers. 

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