Patent ID: 11881928
Assignee: THALES
Field: Telecommunications (Electrical engineering)
Classification: CPC H | IPC H

Claim 23:
24. An integrated telecommunications system comprising:
the space telecommunications system defined according to claim 18; and
at least one terrestrial system,
the terrestrial system comprising:
integrated into one or two terrestrial ground stations, a cellular terrestrial radiofrequency (RF) relay and an interconnection gateway between the terrestrial RF relay and the common fixed terrestrial infrastructure, shared with the multibeam space telecommunications system; and
an access module for accessing the terrestrial system, formed by the space relay and said one or two terrestrial ground stations, said access module being included in the terrestrial station or one among said one or two terrestrial ground stations, and
at least one user space terminal of the multibeam space telecommunications system, configured in dual-mode or multi-mode to communicate in the multibeam space telecommunications system and/or the terrestrial system;
the integrated telecommunications system being wherein:
the access module is configured to, in a prior step, broadcast to said at least one user space terminal which lie in a global geographical coverage of the space relay on the one hand the frequency plan of the multibeam space telecommunications system containing a list of identifiers and of respectively associated frequencies of the carriers of uplinks and of downlinks;
said at least one user space terminal is configured to
in a scan launch and execution step executed after the prior step, scan the broadcasting beacons of the terrestrial system and/or of the multibeam space telecommunications system according to a predetermined scanning algorithm, and provide an indication of a mode of new connection, taken from among connection to the terrestrial system and to the space system, and to be selected, this indication being dependent on the respective availabilities of the terrestrial system and the multibeam space telecommunications system and a selection strategy based on priorities of a system from among the terrestrial system and the multibeam space telecommunications system, and then
in a validation step, validate the indication of the mode of connection to be selected; thereafter
in a step of selecting the communication system, connect to the terrestrial system when the terrestrial mode is selected, and connect to the satellite system when the satellite mode is selected, by executing following steps:
in a first step, the at least one user space terminal emits at a given instant T on a random uplink UL data channel and in a predetermined span of frequencies to the access module one or more bursts of data predominantly of useful traffic, including an identifier and, when the at least one user space terminal is able to determine its geo-location or to aid its geo-location, explicit or implicit information regarding the geographical location of said at least one user space terminal; and then

in a second step, the access module receives and decodes the one or more bursts of data emitted by the at least one user space terminal, associates with the at least one user space terminal a logical beam on the basis of a location information of the at least one user space terminal provided in the first step when the at least one user space terminal is able to determine its geo-location or to aid its geo-location, or derived from the received signal carrying the one or more bursts of data emitted when the at least one user space terminal is not able to determine or to aid its geo-location, the associated logical beam wherein the at least one user space terminal lies at the given instant T being a different predetermined fixed geographical area of a set of geographical areas, the set of geographical areas or set of logical beams forming a tiling of the geographical coverage of the multibeam space telecommunications system, and associates in real time with the logical beam a plurality of one or more physical emission beams of the space relay which at the given instant T overlap the entirety of said logical beam.