Networks funded from 1989-2003

Canadian Institute for Telecommunications Research - CITR

www.citr.ece.mcgill.ca

Earth orbit will soon become the next frontier for high speed Internet communications, as Canadian researchers take a leading role in developing satellite systems that could revolutionize the way users gain access to the network. Rather than plugging their computers into a ground-based network of wires and fiber-optic cables, logging on might become a matter of turning to the sky for a signal as satellite television viewers now do.

A Canadian Institute for Telecommunications Research (CITR) team at McGill University has been working on techniques for helping satellite and earth-based communications systems interact more efficiently, so that space-based networks could handle the speed and volume of data necessary to relay complex multimedia information in real time.

EMS Technologies Canada-one of the network's founding industrial sponsors-is benefiting from CITR's research that has important inputs for the firm's specific applications. Those applications will be part of the commercial rollout of a European satellite network that is due to begin service later this year. Société Européenne des Satellites (SES), the continent's largest supplier of satellite television, intends to pioneer the use of satellites for providing mass market, high-speed Internet access.

EMS has contributed to the design of the SES end-to-end system, including terminals to be employed by users of the new system, as well as the electronic gateways that will link satellites with Internet Service Providers. CITR has played a key role in supporting the development of the communications MAC layer protocol, which is crucial to enabling these various systems to communicate with one another.

The company is continuing to take advantage of CITR researchers' progress in refining these systems, which should eventually make their way onto Canadian satellites such as the Telesat Anik F2, due to be launched in early 2003. EMS will provide an experimental on-board processor to demonstrate direct communications between several small terminals that could be used simultaneously for videoconferencing.

CITR has cultivated a strong partnership with EMS over the past decade, in part by training upwards of a dozen students who have since gone on to work for the company. This steady flow of talent and expertise into the Canadian research community has also been one of the network's leading priorities.

CITR is devoted to increasing the flow of people and ideas to the Canadian telecommunications R&D community by sponsoring industrially relevant research.

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