Iridium Satellite

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Iridium Satellite LLC (www.iridium.com) is the only provider of truly global satellite voice and data solutions with complete coverage of the earth (including oceans, airways and Polar Regions). Iridium delivers essential communications services to and from remote areas where no other form of communication is available. The Iridium constellation consists of 66 low-earth orbiting (LEO), cross-linked satellites and has multiple in-orbit spares.

The constellation operates as a fully meshed network and is the largest commercial satellite constellation in the world. The Iridium service is ideally suited for industries such as maritime, aviation, government/military, emergency/humanitarian services, mining, forestry, oil and gas, heavy equipment, transportation and utilities. Iridium provides service to the U.S. Department of Defense. The company also designs, builds and sells its services, products and solutions through a worldwide network of more than 150 partners.

The company has operations in Leesburg, Virginia where the Satellite Network Operations Center is located, and gateway facilities in Tempe, Arizona and Oahu, Hawaii. Through its own gateway in Hawaii, the U.S. Department of Defense relies on Iridium for global communications capabilities.


Contents

[hide]

[edit] Objectivity Case History

[edit] Important

This information is an archive, so any use of the present sense in the text should be taken in the historical context, generally determinable from the Status section below.

[edit] Customer Information

[edit] Status

  • First Contact:
  • Lead came from:
  • Evaluation Start Date:
  • Evaluation Finish Date:
  • First Purchase Date:
  • Deployment Date: Service went Operational/Commercial November 1, 1998.
  • Current Status:
  • Can we talk about this customer and the product/project? Yes
  • Referenceable?: Ask the rep. Iridium faces a huge upgrade task to move the NOC forward. over one hundred products are involved. We hope to be in the next generation system.

[edit] Environment

  • Hardware: Sun Microsystems SPARCS,
  • Operating System: Solaris 2.5
  • Precision: 32-bit
  • Development language: C++
  • Compiler: Sun
  • Third Party vendor tools: Iona Technologies - "Orbix" CORBA middleware. Sybase (for OSS layer).
  • Open Source tools:


[edit] The Project/Product

[edit] Project Background

Objectivity contacted Iridium after hearing that they had selected Orbix as the CORBA communications for an entirely object-oriented architecture for their new satellite NOC. They had had already started evaluating Oracle (for comparison), ObjectStore and Versant. As a result of our contct they arrange an evaluation and runoff. It quickly narrowed to ObjectStore and Objectivity. Close contact with the evaluators revealed that ODI (ObjectStore) were lying about Objectivity/DB and Objectivity, Inc. After our rebuttal we drew ahead technically and capitalized on ODI's dishonesty.

The project is a spectacular technology demonstration that got off to a very bad commercial start. The withdrawal of a large WHO contract days before service launch effectively stopped them gaining volume rapidly enough to drop the cost of calls and handsets. However, the system has performed wonderfully (see below) and is in continual use by the DoD and emergency services around the world. Iridium Satellite is an independent company, but the satellites are flown by Boeing, whcih acquired the original McDonnell Doglas team that designed the flight control system. The satellites are "flown" as they are subject to atmospheric drag.

A recent independent report rated Iridium as technically superior to its only true rival, GlobalStar. Iridium: 99.2% of calls went through first time. 98.9% stayed connected.

GlobalStar: 51.3% of calls went through first time. 70.7% stayed connected.

The Iridium constellation comprises 66 low-Earth-orbit satellites that talk to each other directly without having to bounce signals to earth stations. In November, Iridium LLC, a consortium of 19 international companies, launched the first global, wireless communication service.

On November 1, 1998, the Iridium constellation of low-earth-orbiting (LEO) satellites made it possible to send and receive phone calls from some of the most remote locations on Earth using radio waves, a satellite, and a satellite phone.

Peering through the atmosphere from 485 miles overhead, 66 Iridium satellites connect with 11 receiving gateways on the ground to complement a land-based phone system that includes microwave towers, telephone lines, undersea cables, and geo-synchronous satellites. Each Iridium satellite is a communication hub for the entire constellation.

The moment an Iridium customer places a call, the satellite telephone transmits a signal to the nearest satellite. Using information provided from the gateway, the satellite sends a message across the constellation to the satellite closest to the receiver and passes the signal to the gateway and -- if the person receiving the call is using a conventional telephone -- into the land-based. If the person receiving the call uses a satellite telephone, the signal travels to the satellite closest to its destination where it is beamed directly to the receiver.

Iridium started eleven years ago, and now the mythology has grown with it. Barry Vertiger, the senior Vice President, was on vacation in the Bahamas, and his wife was complaining - who was a real estate agent - that she couldn’t call home while they were sitting on the beach, to close a big deal, and kind of hit him in the arm and said, You’re a smart guy, cant you make a phone work anywhere? Barry came home, and a couple of engineers got together, and the idea was born.

Iridium works through 66 low orbit satellites. And the handsets that we have communicate directly to the satellites, and then they connect through gateways that we have located throughout the world, that hook up to the public switched telephone network. So you just dial the phone, contacts a satellite, and then it routes the call to the appropriate number, wherever it is in the world.

Iridium is a TDMA packet switched digital network until it gets to the switch, and then it is converted over to analog, so the rest of the world can handle it.

Vice President Gore made a call to the great grandson of Alexander Graham Bell, and that was the first official commercial call. "These satellite-based systems complete the telephone coverage of the Earth's surface that Alexander Graham Bell began more than a century ago," U.S. Vice President Gore told former National Geographic president Gilbert Grosvenor during the system's inaugural call. Grosvenor is the great grandson of Bell.

There were three launch providers - Boeing, and their Delta Two. .Russia, to Krunachev - that’s Russia’s space command - launched seven on a Proton. And with China Great Wall in Beijing, and they used a Long March vehicle, and launched two at a time. So there was three Long Marches, three Protons, and about seven or eight Deltas.

The biggest issue was spectrum allocation. They had to convince some 220 countries in the world to all let us use the same frequency over their country, for transmitting and receiving, and so it had to go to the World Radio Conference, and get agreement to do that. Countries protect their spectrum quite jealously, so they had to work a number of political issues in that arena, and have been fairly successful now. They’ve got almost all the key licenses it needed, and they think over the next six or seven months, they’ll get the rest of the licenses.

What role did Sun Microsystems play: Sun equipment is used extensively, throughout the Iridium system. There are basically two major aspects of the system. They’re the Gateways, which are located around the world in eleven (11) different countries. And within the Gateway, it is used as the key controller for the operation and maintenance controller of the radio RF system. That does all the call processing. It is used for the earth terminal subsystem. That controls connectivity to the constellation. It is used for the operation and maintenance controller of the gateway, which is the primary human interface that controls the gateway, and it is used in the message termination controller, which does all of our paging for the system.

In Motorola’s Mission Planning and Scheduling system, Objectivity/DB is the embedded solution which controls and stores all the intelligent objects which tells the satellite “what to do and how to do it” (schedules) once launched and in orbit. Each Satellite relies on this software system with respect to the relationships and timelines between all the components and interactions within the satellite’s CPU. Objectivity/DB in essence tells each satellite when to wake up, point it’s antenna in it’s neighbors direction, switch it’s communication responsibility from one satellite to another, move in a certain direction, etc. Specifically, Objectivity/DB and the Mission Planning and Scheduling System manages over 80 complex schedules (instructions, timelines and relationships) through the Telemetry Tracking and Acquisition Center. The ground facility for this intelligence link between management systems on earth and the Satellite’s CPU in orbit is called the Master Control Facility based in Washington, DC.

That’s really the network management of it. And then, in the Iridium system, the network operations center in Washington, the whole control facility, there’s over 250 servers and 60 workstations that we have back there, to control the satellite constellation, and ground network management system, to do all the orbital services. And about ten Sun servers are used just for mission planning.

Iridium has been postured to be a high end system. It is not for the everyday user, somewhat like cellular was, when cellular was first rolled out. So, it will be expensive, but there are a couple different uses for it. The high end business traveler, who needs connectivity wherever he goes, is Iridium's primary target. But then there are other agencies. Like, the 30 phones they recently sent down to South America, to help in disaster recovery after Hurricane Mitch went through down there.

9/23/98 - Iridium LLC, the $5 billion satellite-based mobile phone system, is delaying the launch of commercial telephone service by more than a month because more time is needed to test the global network and phone handsets.

Iridium was originally planned to have 77 active satellites, and named after the element with 77 electrons, but redesigned to need fewer satellites - the 66 active satellites of today. (We're not counting in-orbit or ground spares.). Iridium satellites were planned to have six, rather than four, intersatellite links.

[edit] Project/Product Description

The Iridium Satellite Network Operation Center or SNOC is located in Leesburg, Virginia. Its responsibility is to manage the performance and status of individual satellites. It also manages the network by developing and distributing routing tables for use by the satellites and gateways, directing traffic routing through the network and controlling satellite cell formation.

In Motorola’s Mission Planning and Scheduling system, Objectivity/DB is the embedded solution which controls and stores all the intelligent objects which tells the satellite “what to do and how to do it” (schedules) once launched and in orbit. Each Satellite relies on this software system with respect to the relationships and timelines between all the components and interactions within the satellite’s CPU. Objectivity/DB in essence tells each satellite when to wake up, point it’s antenna in it’s neighbors direction, switch it’s communication responsibility from one satellite to another, move in a certain direction, etc. Specifically, Objectivity/DB and the Mission Planning and Scheduling System manages over 80 complex schedules (instructions, timelines and relationships) through the Telemetry Tracking and Acquisition Center. The ground facility for this intelligence link between management systems on earth and the Satellite’s CPU in orbit is called the Master Control Facility based in Washington, DC.


[edit] Buying Criteria

[edit] Business Priorities

  • Company stability
  • Server or site pricing

[edit] Technical Priorities

  • Scalability
  • performance and throughput
  • Support for geographic indexing (we helped them develop a quadtree index for managing beam control as satellites overfly an area).
  • Integration with Iona Technologies "Orbix" CORBA middleware - we did this and produced a technical note that is on our SE site.

Here are some SE progress reports close to service launch time...

"With the network up and working the key issues Motorola faces is how not only how to keep the availability up to telecommunications standards, but also how to leverage their development investment in future products. The incumbent vendors like Objectivity and Sun Microsystem want to be the vendors of choice in the reuse of software and hardware for the Teledisic and Second Generation Iridium Programs. Therefore the continued support of each other's products like Solaris 7 is critical in the sustaining support Motorola requires for the Iridium products and the of systems they will be the prime contractor in the development throughout it's life cycle.

Currently the Iridium project has several key issues with respect to Objectivity/DB during their deployment phase. Specifically, they are having technical support issues with respect to versioning and transaction abort problems. The versioning problem is their most important key issue do to the fact that they keep introducing new features and new versions of the MPS software. By using our versioning features Motorola will be able to automate a great deal of the schedules and maintenance of the satellites. Furthermore, they would like to introduce these new features without taking the system down. MEANING: Losing communication with the 22 or so Satellites as they introduce new versions of the software. If were able to fix our Objectivity/DB class versioning problems within Motorola’s environment, Motorola will be able to add these changes to the MPS system without losing contact/communication with all the Satellites during maintenance.

They are having a major versioning issue with respect to class versioning and what we have provided them in the past. It has been identified that this is a bug in the work around in which we’ve provided them before. Hence, we will provide a bug fix them ASAP (Monday, Sept 21, 1998). This may have a direct impact to meet their launch date as of 9/21/98. In Motorola’s Mission Planning and Scheduling system, Objectivity/DB is the embedded solution which controls and stores all the intelligent objects which tells the satellite “what to do and how to do it” (schedules) once launched and in orbit. Each Satellite relies on this software system with respect to the relationships and timelines between all the components and interactions within the satellite’s CPU. Objectivity/DB in essence tells each satellite when to wake up, point it’s antenna in it’s neighbors direction, switch it’s communication responsibility from one satellite to another, move in a certain direction, etc. Specifically, Objectivity/DB and the Mission Planning and Scheduling System manages over 80 complex schedules (instructions, timelines and relationships) through the Telemetry Tracking and Acquisition Center. The ground facility for this intelligence link between management systems on earth and the Satellite’s CPU in orbit is called the Master Control Facility based in Washington, DC.

Currently the Iridium project has several key issues with respect to Objectivity/DB during their deployment phase. Specifically, they are having technical support issues with respect to versioning and transaction abort problems. The versioning problem is their most important key issue do to the fact that they keep introducing new features and new versions of the MPS software. By using our versioning features Motorola will be able to automate a great deal of the schedules and maintenance of the satellites. Furthermore, they would like to introduce these new features without taking the system down. MEANING: Losing communication with the 22 or so Satellites as they introduce new versions of the software. If were able to fix our Objectivity/DB versioning problems within Motorola’s environment, Motorola will be able to add these changes to the MPS system without losing contact/communication with all the Satellites during maintenance."

The "transaction abort problem" turned out to be related to CORBA, not Objectivity/DB. CORBA clients were passing control and data to each other without releasing and acquiring the appropriate locks. This could lead processes to abort because they couldn't obtain the update locks held by the controlling processes that spawned them.

The class versioning problem was fixed in a matter of days and the old functionality was later replaced by Active Schema. In the end, it wasn't the O-O technology that delayed the launch, it was the Operations Support System based on Sybase that wasn't ready in time.

[edit] Competitors/Alternatives

  • ObjectStore - see the comments above
  • Oracle - eliminated early because of the mapping issues.
  • Sybase - used in the billing systems, but not in the scheduling and management systems.
  • Iona Technolgies "Orbix" (CORBA middleware) - but they became a partner instead.

[edit] Why They Chose Objectivity

  • We met the technical criteria.
  • We partnered with Iona
  • Attention to technical and commercial details.
  • ODI (ObjectStore) lied.

Objectivity has been instrumental in keeping track of all Motorola’s complex objects, which also have complex relationships within the Mission Planning and Scheduling system. In addition, Motorola would not be able to scale to the number of distributed satellites they are keeping track of unless they used our distributed object engine. Furthermore, they are under extreme timelines with respect to introducing new features and changes as they are deploying satellites. This type of RAD during their deployment phase can only be accomplished with the assistance of our schema evolution and versioning capabilities.

Being in the middle of a mission critical software system demands the robustness that both Objectivity and Sun Microsystems can provide. This was proven after 3 years of development and now, deployment.

[edit] Partners

  • Iona Technologies

[edit] Collateral

  1. Press Releases:
  2. Fliers:
  3. White Papers:
  4. Case Study: * Case Study
  5. Other: There is a technical Note about CORBA and Objectivity/DB on the internal SE material site.

[edit] Contact Information

  • Objectivity Rep:
  • Customer Contact: Formerly - Jeff Garland and Jake Doan - IMPORTANT - See the note in the introduction above.
  • Customer Phone:
  • Customer Email:
  • URL:

[edit] External Links

[edit] Related Pages

[edit] Categories

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