Migration of DOD SATCOM Earth Segment Architectures to Digital IF

DOD SATCOM Earth segment architectures are poised to migrate to Digital IF as the medium of choice. This migration is already underway within commercial SATCOM. Motivators in the case of DOD SATCOM include mission demand for resilience, carrier count congestion, RF bandwidth growth, operational demand for virtualization, modem value proposition, and environmental hardening. Migration at DOD SATCOM gateways is anticipated in three phases, commencing now with foundational groundwork, leading soon to baseline infrastructure, then followed by advanced initiatives such as virtualization and management automation. This migration is being supported by updates to necessary MIL standards and WGS Performance Certification processes to enable WGS access. Subsequent enterprise gateway deployment and robust terrestrial mesh networking achieves SATCOM resilience and mission planning flexibility while enabling the aggregation of baseband operations to regional facilities. Digital IF is fast maturing. Digital IF technology investment is being made and the IEEE-ISTO 4900–2021 “DIFI Standard” for interoperability has just been published. These developments will enable growth and reduce overall lifecycle costs for all manner of communication systems. On all counts, a comprehensive migration to Digital IF, well under way commercially, is also now beginning for DOD SATCOM Earth segment architectures.