RBCT Chapter 48 Launch Meeting
Chapter 48 Launch Meeting
February 5th, the launch meeting for the second phase of joint research and development of Sky Dome.
In the main conference hall on the 30th floor of Blue Bay Communications headquarters, Zuo Cheng stood in this room for the third time. The first time was as an intern reviewer, where he was a questioner. The second time was at a partner conference, where he was an audience member. This time, he was the keynote speaker.
The venue was filled with over forty people—the core team of Blue Bay Communications' Sky Dome Business Unit, representatives from twelve partners, and three external expert consultants. Zhou Henian sat in the center of the first row, next to Lu Mingyuan, the general manager of the Sky Dome Business Unit.
The presentation began with Lu Mingyuan giving a 15-minute overview of the project before handing the microphone to Zuo Cheng.
"Next, please welcome Mr. Zuo Cheng from 402 Technology to present the technical roadmap for the ground terminal signal processing platform."
Zuo Cheng walked to the projection screen.
He wore a dark blue shirt, but no tie—he disliked ties, feeling they interfered with his breathing. After standing still, he didn't immediately open the PowerPoint presentation; instead, he first surveyed the room.
"Hello everyone. Before discussing the technical solution, I'd like to mention a number."
He held up one finger.
"One hundred and twenty. That's the number of satellites to be networked in the second phase of the Sky Dome project. The first phase had six, and the second phase has one hundred and twenty. The complexity of signal processing isn't multiplied by twenty, but by the square of twenty—because with each additional satellite, the switching relationships, interference relationships, and coordination relationships between it and all other satellites increase exponentially."
He pressed the remote control, and an architecture diagram appeared on the screen.
"Therefore, we cannot directly scale the architecture from the first stage. We need a completely new multi-star parallel processing architecture."
For the next forty minutes, he explained the technical solution designed for the second phase of the 402 Sky Dome from beginning to end.
The core idea can be summarized in four words: "layered parallelism".
The first layer is the physical layer parallelism: each satellite corresponds to an independent signal processing pipeline, and the pipelines do not interfere with each other. The number of satellites in orbit can be dynamically expanded or reduced.
The second layer is the parallel prediction layer: the bottom layer of the two-layer prediction architecture models each satellite independently, while the adaptive compensation parameters of the upper layer are shared among all pipelines. This means that when a satellite encounters extreme weather, its compensation experience can be synchronized to other pipelines in real time, improving the robustness of the entire system.
The third layer is the decision-making layer collaboration: the spectrum management module uniformly schedules the frequency resources of all pipelines, and the beam management module uniformly coordinates the antenna pointing of all terminals. This layer is jointly supported by Tang Xu's beam coordination algorithm and the spectrum sensing module newly developed by 402.
When they got to the third floor, Zuo Cheng noticed that Zhou Henian leaned forward slightly.
Q&A session.
The first person to raise their hand was an expert from the Blue Star Aerospace Academy of Sciences—the one who asked about the process's generalization capabilities during last year's review.
"In your layered parallel architecture, will the parameter sharing mechanism in the second layer become a performance bottleneck? How do you handle lock contention when 120 pipes are simultaneously reading and writing shared parameters?"
"Lock-free design," Zuo Cheng replied. "Shared parameters use a circular buffer and version number mechanism. Each pipe reads a snapshot of the most recent complete update, so no locking is required. There's only one write end—the upper-layer adaptive engine, which updates parameters at fixed intervals. These intervals are much longer than the time it takes to read a single file, preventing read-write conflicts."
The expert flipped through the solution document in his hand, found the corresponding chapter, and nodded after reading it for half a minute.
The second question comes from Wang Jianping of Dingxin Information.
"Have you assessed the communication overhead for inter-terminal collaborative networking, which requires the exchange of status information between terminals?"
"It's been evaluated." Zuo Cheng pulled up a page of data. "In a full-load scenario with 120 stars, the communication overhead for state exchange between terminals accounts for 0.3% of the total bandwidth. We used a compression coding scheme—transmitting only incremental changes, not the full state—to reduce the overhead to a negligible level."
Wang Jianping didn't press the matter. His expression was subtle—it seemed as if he was verifying his partner's technical capabilities, and also as if he was confirming that his investment hadn't been a mistake.
The third question comes from Zhou Henian.
Just like during last year's review, he was the last person to ask a question.
"Zuo Cheng, what's the theoretical upper limit of your architecture in stars?"
The room fell silent.
The subtext of this question is clear—the ultimate goal of Tianqiong is 1,200 satellites, not 120. Zhou Henian is asking: Can your architecture last until the end?
Zuo Cheng thought for three seconds.
"The architecture itself has no theoretical upper limit. The layered parallel design is horizontally scalable; the number of pipelines can grow linearly with the number of satellites, and there is no ceiling at the architectural level." He paused, "But the upper limit at the engineering level depends on the computing power and memory of the hardware platform. Based on current embedded platform performance estimates, a single terminal can support tracking twelve to fifteen satellites simultaneously. Full network coverage of 1,200 satellites does not require a single terminal to track all satellites; it only needs to track the few visible overhead. So the answer is: this architecture can support the final form of the celestial dome."
A very slight smile appeared at the corner of Zhou Henian's mouth, the same one Zuo Cheng had seen twice before.
"good."
After the launch meeting, Zuo Cheng was stopped by Lu Mingyuan in the corridor outside the venue.
"Zuo Cheng, your report is very thorough. The technical committee gave your proposal a very high evaluation." Lu Mingyuan handed him a document. "This is the first batch of development task book for the second phase, covering two subsystems: multi-satellite parallel signal processing and spectrum management. The delivery nodes and acceptance criteria are all inside. Take a close look when you get back."
Zuo Cheng took the document and glanced at the first page—the first batch of deliveries was due in six months.
"Also—" Lu Mingyuan lowered his voice, "After the meeting, President Zhou said something to me. He said, 'This young man's vision extends beyond the ground terminal.' I'm not entirely sure what he meant, but that should be a good thing for you."
Zuo Cheng went over those words in his mind.
"This young man's vision extends beyond the ground terminal."
What did Zhou Henian see?
He thought for a few seconds but couldn't come up with a definite answer. But he vaguely sensed that what this sentence pointed to was something far beyond the second stage of the Celestial Dome.
It was already dark when I walked out of the Blue Bay Communications Building. Early February in Huaxia City was still quite cold; you could see the white breath of our breath under the streetlights.
Zuo Cheng took out his phone and sent a message to Yu Ying.
"Kongkong, the kickoff meeting is over. President Zhou asked me a question during the meeting—whether my architecture can last until the end of the Sky Dome."
Yu Ying replied instantly: "What did you answer?"
"I said yes."
"That's possible," Yu Ying texted, then added, "Brother, you said you'd go far. I believe you."
Zuo Cheng looked at the words, put his phone back in his pocket, and smiled in the cold wind.
It's a long way.
Yes, it will.