It turned out that the application of flexible Adaptive Coding and Modulation (ACM) leads to a significant increase in the efficiency and capacity of the system when compared to a system with a fixed physical layer. It has been shown that the proposed physical layer adaptation strategy leads to a system efficiency loss of only about 5% considering the transparent forward link for the transparent return link. The analysis results indicate an acceptable loss of about 20% can be achieved.

Furthermore, it has been demonstrated that the application of FMT to DVB-S forward and future RCS return link is supported by today's signalling. However, a versatile encapsulation of IP datagrams over the Generic Stream (GS) interface would offer a better exploitation of the improved physical layer capacity.

In a follow-on project "Resources Management using Adaptive Fade Mitigation Techniques (FMT) in DVB-RCS Multi-Beam Systems”, the same team, now lead by Triagnosys and completed by DLR and Nera, currently proposes and analyses radio resource management schemes for DVB-S2/RCS like systems that take into account adaptive coding and modulation for fade mitigation and guarantee quality of service for different services.

The study will investigate the performance of the RM solutions through detailed simulations. A sophisticated simulator will be developed that allows in-depth modelling of the satellite system, and will implement the pre-selected RRM architecture, algorithms and protocols. End-to-end service simulation will derive system performance measures for efficiency and quality.