Satellite-links are ideal for areas with no or only limited terrestrial connectivity, like in rural regions. Further, Satellite-links present a secure and reliable alternative (or supplement) to cable-based links crossing regions that can't be secured. They can also serve to establish or maintain connectivity in case of natural disasters.

IP-based Point-to-Point Links are used to connect remote sites to the Internet or to connect private networks. Depending on the application, they can be bi-directional or uni-directional, symmetric or asymmetric.

gcs offers two Product families for this kind of applications:

• ODG Product Family
  • The ODG Product family contains products for IP Encapsulation and DVB Modulation.
• BSR Product Family
  • The BDR Product family contains products for DVB Demodulation and IP Decapsulation.

Combined, they provide an end-to-end solution for IP trunking.

Both product families are able to use ULE, MPE and GSE as encapsulation protocols and fully support the IPv6 protocol in addition to IPv4.

They can be configured to work as ISO/OSI Layer 2 Bridging devices, emulating a direct cable link, or as ISO/OSI Layer 3 Routers.

For many applications, latency and throughput are essential. Therefore, the ODG Family supports Quality of Service (QoS) based traffic prioritisation.

Link Optimization

Especially for expensive links, like for Satellite links, it is important to make most out of the available capacity. gcs provides various technologies to help our customers to optimize their links:

• Modulation and Coding : DVB-S2 uses optimized modulation schemes and advanced block coding mechanisms. It provides about 30 percent and more performance gain, compared with DVB-S with the same bandwidth and signal-to-noise ratio. gcs provides DVB-S2 Modulators (ODG Series) and DVB-S2 Demodulators (BSR Series) which are fully compliant to all relevant standards and thus provide interoperability with products of other vendors and end-user DVB equipment.
• Adaptive Coding and Modulation (ACM) : gcs products supports an advanced DVB-S2 feature called ACM which allows to dynamically optimize the coding and modulation to the current channel conditions.
• Encapsulation Protocols : ULE for DVB-S/S2 and GSE for DVB-S2 are more efficient than the well-established MPE encapsulation mechanism, especially for IPv6 traffic. gcs supports all of these protocols in its products and allows for a smooth transition towards GSE.
• Compression and Web Caching : The SiMPLE product family supports transparent adaptive content compression as well as web caching to optimize the performance of over satellite links. Furthermore it supports encryption, DNS off-loading and provides interfaces for Authentication, Authorisation and Accounting (AAA).

Security

Security is an important topic, especially for broadcast links (satellite, terrestrial). gcs provides solutions on different ISO/OSI layers using IPSec, PPTP, OpenVPN or DVB-specific link layer security schemes like ULESec, where GCS closely collaborates with the authors of the according IETF draft.

Enterprise Networking

In Enterprise Networks, availability and network management are key topics:

• gcs products can be easily integrated in various redundancy schemes using the integrated alarm relay outputs and mute inputs. Furthermore, GCS can provide solutions which uses ISO/OSI layer 2 redundancy (STP/RSTP) and ISO/OSI layer 3 redundancy (VRRP, IP routing protocols) to provide maximum reliability, even if the equipment is located at different physical locations.
• gcs products can be managed through various interfaces like SNMP, Web, Serial Connections or our own XML-RPC based interface called Flex:RPC. SNMP allows for a easy integration in large network management/monitoring systems whereas Flex:RPC enables customers to closely integrate our products in their own systems and environments.

Did you know?

• gcs, in cooperation with University of Salzburg, was the first company which transferred IP Data over DVB-based Satellite links.
• We are the IP-DVB technology leader with strong involvement in the development of the DVB Forum GSE protocol, which is the new standard for transmitting IP data over DVB-S2 links. Further, gcs staff co-authored and contributed to various Satellite related Internet-Drafts including the ULE Standard (RFC 4326).