Incorporation of UMTS Future Capabilities for MUOS Evolution
Oak,Andrew
The Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory
Zheng,Harold
The Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory
Wang,Sherry
The Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory
Jen,Tao
The Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory
The Mobile User Objective System (MUOS) is DoD’s next generation UHF SATCOM system. The MUOS design is based on the commercial 3G UMTS/WCDMA architecture. As a commercial architecture, UMTS is continually evolving to provide new and improved services to its customers. By leveraging this architecture and much of its associated ground components, MUOS may also be able to incorporate new UMTS features/services with limited development. In this paper, the authors discuss some UMTS future capabilities that may be considered for incorporation into future upgrades of MUOS. This includes discussion of the possible benefit to MUOS users, and the extent of interest from commercial vendors in providing these features. The former helps characterize the potential need for the feature, while the latter helps us speculate on how strongly MUOS may leverage evolution of the commercial product.
Andrew Oak is a member of the Principal Professional Staff in the Communication and Networking Systems Group at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory. His primary work assignments in recent years have focused on MUOS and other aspects of UHF SATCOM. Andrew received his B.S.E.E from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, and his M.S.E.E. from the University of Virginia.