Using Control Engineering to Improve Regulatory Review of Flexible SATCOM Terminal Advocacy

Some difficulties are reviewed in keeping satellite communication (SATCOM) responsive as operational environments and requirements rapidly evolve, especially related to accessing advanced services and providing resilience against threats. Growing interest is currently being addressed to SATCOM terminal flexibility for operating across multiple Geostationary orbit (GSO) and Non-Geostationary orbit (NGSO) constellations, in multiple frequency bands and support different modems/routers. In this paper, the emphasis is on the feasibility of using learning and control engineering to help SATCOM regulatory agencies more efficiently, consistently, and effectively analyze requests to autonomously operate flow control and dynamic resource allocation consistent with increasing demands for connectivity and bandwidth. Due to the repetitive nature of user experiences, application performances, and service level agreements, terminal assignments of center frequencies for transmission, signal bandwidths, communication modes, and time intervals for transmission could benefit from the data collected during previous downlink mode change requests and uplink terminal reports. Intelligent terminal agents and enforcement coordination between terminal routers and modems are proposed and discussed in the views of iterative learning and Minimal-Cost-Variance (MCV) control-theoretic frameworks.