The new frontier of EHF for Broadcast and Multimedia Satellite Services

the new broadband frontier for satellite communications will be the exploitation of the bandwidth portions in the millimeter wave domain, namely: Extremely High Frequencies (EHFs). The present work aims at providing a survey about opportunities and challenges of EHF exploitation for multimedia satellite services to residential customary, including high-definition TV broadcasting, multimedia content delivery, Internet-of-Things, etc. The future perspective of the integration with terrestrial 5G that will exploit EHF for high-capacity transmission over small local areas is considered as well. The theoretical analysis confirms that EHF satellite links can offer an unprecedented capacity, clearly superior than that offered by Ku and Ka-band links. However, some crucial issues are still open in terms of mitigation of tropospheric propagation impairments, accurate waveform design, deployment of suitable networking architectures able at contrasting the very large bandwidth-delay product characterizing EHF satellites. Some application scenarios have been considered and some hints are provided in order to translate the theoretical advantages into actual service offer.