VSAT

Very Small aperture terminal system

 VSAT Very Small Aperture Terminal System. The main aim for the usage of VSAT is to reduce the antenna dishes in earth station to 1.5m diameter or less. Provides two way communication facilities. Its mainly used in banking and financial institutions, retail stores, etc.,

VSAT - STRUCTURE
VSAT consists of a hub station which provides broadcast facilities to all other VSATs in the network and connects the VSAT to the satellite through Multiple Access mode. Hub station is operated by service provider and it shares it among the users TDMA is mostly used for downlink mode of transmission, but lacks efficiency in uplink due to low density traffic.

 For efficient uplink and downlink purpose FDMA access method is used, which allows the use of comparatively low-power VSAT terminals. DAMA- Demand Assigned Multiple Access is employed in some systems where channel capacity has fluctuating demands. DAMA can be coupled and used with both TDMA and FDMA. Disadvantage of DAMA is, it needs reserve channel to be instituted for channel allocation.

CDMA & ALOHA PROTOCOL

Abramson pointed the drawback of accessing through shifts through which the users may access the reserve channel. To overcome this drawback CDMA (Code division Multiple access) using spread spectrum techniques, coupled with ALOHA Protocol. ALOHA protocol is a random access method in which packets are transmitted at random in different time slots. The system is used where the packet time is very small compared to the slot time. Avoids packet collision occurring due to the packets sent from different VSATs.

VSAT OPERATION
VSAT operates in STAR configuration Each VSAT should be connected to the hub to transmit to each other. Requires a double-hop circuit, increase in propagation delay and double satellite capacity. To avoid this, Hughes suggested MESH configuration which can connect to each other through a single hop.

Operation, Coverage &Bands

Predominantly operates in Ku band, C- band systems are also found in existence. For fixed area coverage Beamwidth is constant, independent of the carrier frequency, gain is constant.

DISADVANTAGES
High initial cost Optimizing networks for large networks. Lack of direct VSAT-to- VSAT links.