On-Board Processing For Satellite-Terrestrial Integration

Flexibility in satellites is one of the major requirements to make use of them in the 5G environment. Akey method to achieve this goal is on-board processing. Satellites have become more and more flexible in recent days, started by the development years ago with the development of digital transparent processors to gain flexibility in frequency and channel allocation.First, this chapter gives a brief history of on-board processers (OBPs) followed by a classification of OBPs. For illustration, the current design of the Fraunhofer OBP (FOBP) is described followed by an exemplary 5G use case for OBP using low-earth orbiting (LEO) satellites. The chapter closes with a short summary.