Importance

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Abstract

A communications system includes at least one low earth orbit first satellite (10), at least one second satellite (11) in other than a low earth orbit, and a ground segment (12) that includes a plurality of user transceivers (78, 80, 82, 84) and at least one gateway (76) coupled to a publicly-accessible terrestrial communications system, such as a PSTN and/or a fiber optic network. The first satellite includes a first transceiver for communication with the at least one gateway, a second transceiver for communication with at least one user transceiver, and a third transceiver for communication with the at least one second satellite. The first, second and third transceivers are switchably coupled together on-board the first satellite by on-board processors and a switching matrix for relaying a user communication between the at least one gateway and the at least one user transceiver via the at least one second satellite. The plurality of user transceivers can include a plurality of data processors which are interconnected into a network through the at least one first satellite. This network can be considered as a virtual network, and can have a mesh, star, or other topology. In a presently preferred, but not limiting embodiment of this invention, the user transceivers are adapted to transmit and receive direct sequence, code division/multiple access communications. Transmission of signals to and from the user transceivers is accomplished by spreading a digital data stream (e.g., voice, data, image, video) with assigned spreading codes.

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First Claim