Comtech Heights H-Plus ODU Remote Gateway

Description

The H-Plus ODU Remote Gateway is a dual-purpose modem. The H-Plus can be used as a Point-to-Point SCPC modem or can be purposed as a mid-tier Heights Remote Gateway. It is capable of providing high-performance for low to medium capacity sites at an attractive CAPEX. It supports multiple transmit throughput tiers up to 10 Mbps, which is managed via centralised licensing capability for ease of use. This scheme allows users to standardise on a single remote platform for low to medium capacity sites, simplifying stocking and sparing.

The Heights™ Networking Platform is engineered to elevate your services with unparalleled horsepower, efficiency and intelligence. The Heights platform was designed with the service provider and its multi-user environments in mind, from concept to operation, Heights combines our most efficient waveforms, header and payload compression engines, WAN optimisation, proven dynamic bandwidth and power management along with bi-directional ACM capability to provide the highest user throughput, highest availability, and most optimal resource utilisation available in the industry.

Heights meets the demands of those operating on traditional wide beams while providing distinct advantages for those with High throughput Satellites (HTS) in their future. Heights is HTS ready, allowing service providers to leverage the significant increases in performance these new designs will offer for inbound links.

Purpose-built to unleash the potential of these tight spot beams, Heights remote gateways provide the strongest processing performance, maximising user IP bits per Hz while realising significant gains in user IP bits per Amplifier (BUC) Watt.

Heights Dynamic Network Access (H-DNA / Heights Mode Only)
H-DNA is an evolutionary dynamic network access technology designed for Heights return links that:

• Rapidly adapts to changing environments.
• Delivers superior efficiency & Quality of Experience (QoE).
• Instantly assigns capacity based on network-wide demand.
• Intelligently utilises total network bandwidth at all times.

H-DNA is designed to provide network wide fast switching on a sub-second interval making the process seamless and transparent to end users for real-time as well as non real-time applications. H-DNA leverages Comtech’s high performance VersaFEC-2 waveforms with ACM, dynamic power control, high performance packet processing, network wide multi-tier QoS and IP optimisation technology to enable unprecedented bandwidth efficiency and superior QoE. H-DNA fast switching and bandwidth allocation mechanism allows a Heights network to respond rapidly to changing traffic and link conditions while maintaining lowest latency and jitter for superior QoE and maximum bandwidth utilisation efficiency. H-DNA is fast, flexible and uncompromising, delivering unprecedented benefits to users and service providers alike.

SCPC Mode of Operation
The H-Plus can be used as a Heights Remote Gateway or a true SCPC point-to-point modem and is interoperable with another H-Plus or Comtech’s award-winning SCPC modems such as the CDM-625A and CDM-425 modems. This is very beneficial for users who anticipate growing their network or need more flexibility or don’t have access to a Heights Hub.

• Start a smaller SCPC network and transition to Heights; re-purpose all existing SCPC modems and retain your investment.
• Transition to Heights without having to re-visit remote sites (over the air conversion to/from SCPC & Heights).
• Transition from Heights to SCPC in a mobility environment where a Heights Hub may not be available or financially practicable.

Unparalleled Remote Horsepower
Each Remote Gateway provides unprecedented processing power with all multi-layer optimisation features enabled on the device. The
performance levels enable the Heights remote gateway suite to support the most demanding of multimedia traffic mixes in a single unit and provide the headroom required to leverage new HTS spacecraft designs. The increased G/T performance of these new spacecraft allow for significantly more throughput to be transmitted in the inbound direction, in terms of Mbps. However, this increased Mbps cannot be met if the underlying packet processing is not able to keep up with traffic flow. Our remote gateways all have the underlying processing power to enable service providers to take full advantage of the potential of these new HTS designs and grow service levels as end users’ demands grow.

WAN Optimisation and GPRS Tunneling Protocol (GTP) Mobile User Data Traffic Optimisation (Heights Mode Only)
Heights Remote Gateways incorporate embedded WAN optimisation for Internet Traffic and GTP traffic Optimisation.
GTP is used in mobile networks on 3G IuPS, 3G IuH and LTE S1 interfaces. Mobile subscriber traffic is encapsulated within an IP/UDP/GTP tunnel. Heights remote incorporate embedded GTP traffic optimisation which allows for optimisation of the mobile subscriber traffic within the GTP tunnel, improving user Quality of Experience (QoE) through greater throughput and faster response time, and rendering the Mobile Network more efficient.

Heights WAN and GTP optimisation provide TCP acceleration, based on Comtech’s patented Turbo Stream Performance Enhancement Protocol (PEP). Turbo Stream mitigates TCP performance issues across long delay links through intelligent implementations of scalable WAN TCP windows, and traffic multiplexing of LAN TCP sessions into persistent WAN TCP sessions. This process greatly reduces “time to first byte”, which means that the traffic starts flowing much faster than it would otherwise, and also enables traffic to ramp up to levels which would not be otherwise possible over long latency VSAT links.

Heights WAN and GTP optimisation incorporate remote DNS caching enabling remote users’ web browsers to quickly resolve Host names to IP addresses locally, once again speeding up the “time to first byte”. Without local DNS caching, all DNS inquiries would have to traverse the VSAT link leading to longer delays before traffic starts actually flowing. Heights WAN and GTP optimisation also support image smoothing, thereby reducing the amount of data that needs to traverse the satellite link. Image smoothing also speeds up the time to download the webpages. WAN and GTP optimisation requires the FX Series at the hub. WAN optimisation and GTP optimisation is fully integrated with network wide multi-tier QoS, ACM and IP optimisation for maximum performance and efficiency.

Seamless Bridge Point-to-Multipoint (BPM) Mode or Routed Mode (Heights Mode Only)
In addition to routed mode, the Heights Networking Platform supports BPM mode for true layer 2 operation enabling seamless integration with service provider network. A Heights network operating in BPM mode can be viewed as an Ethernet switch supporting VLAN and MPLS while benefiting from bi-directional IP optimisation, network wide multi-tier QoS, ACM and dynamic bandwidth management. H-Plus includes extensive VLAN support including VLAN Access mode, trunk mode and QinQ. In BPM mode, H-Plus supports traffic classification and QoS by VLAN ID as well as MPLS Traffic Class Field (formerly referred to as EXP bits).

Global IP Roaming (Heights Mode Only)
An embedded mobility controller in H-Plus enables a satellite terminal on-board a mobile platform to seamlessly transition between satellite beams or hub coverage with minimal service interruption. The embedded mobility controller interfaces with the Antenna Control Unit (ACU), maintains satellite footprint maps and initiates beam switching and handoff as the vessel moves through the satellite footprint. It offers a common management interface for the mobility server and the ACU by providing a set of commands, information, interfaces and status queries.

Benefits

• High throughput capabilities support increasing end user traffic demands.
• Multiple throughput tiers managed by centralised software licensing simplify stocking and sparing.
• Future-proof design allows remote gateways to take advantage of significant throughput increase potential of new HTS designs.
• High performance waveforms combined with multi-layer optimisation delivers the highest user IP bits per Hz, as well as highest user IP bits per Amplifier (BUC) Watt, minimising Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) over network life.
• Seamless Bridge Point-to-Multipoint (BPM) mode provides seamless integration with service provider network.
• Extensive VLAN support enabling traffic separation for multi-user environments.
• GTP and WAN Optimisation improves user experience for web applications while saving bandwidth.
• Embedded mobility controller enables global roaming.