Recent Advances in Satellite and Space Communications - IEEE Xplore

JOURNAL OF COMMUNICATIONS AND NETWORKS, VOL. 12, NO. 6, DECEMBER 2010

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Recent Advances in Satellite and Space Communications Igor Bisio, Riccardo De Gaudenzi, Hung Nguyen, Fotini-Niovi Pavlidou, and Takaya Yamazato Many of the wireless technologies used today are based on the efforts initiated by satellite communications researchers decades ago. Thus, the main technology behind the different applications is very similar in both terrestrial and space systems although today satellite is often benefiting from wireless techniques advancement. This is very supportive today, with the ever growing demand for multimedia services, high mobility and global connectivity leading us to a truly transparent interoperability of our flourishing communications infrastructure. Satellite systems have always a key role to play covering this demand for ordinary as well as for emergency situations. This Special Issue of JCN puts together high-quality research articles on recent advances in satellite and space communications. The focus is targeted on exploring and discussing new technical advance and applications focusing on several aspects related to satellite and space communications. In more detail: Multi-carrier systems and modulation; quality of service (QoS) in satellite networks; error recovery and synchronization methods; security issues.

1. Multi-Carrier Systems and Modulation Two papers on multi-carrier (MC) systems were selected for publication in this special issue because of their applications in satellite communications (SATCOM). Even though research progress on terrestrial multi-carrier wireless systems using orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) has been well established over many years with operational systems currently deployed, SATCOM technology has not been able to benefit from these terrestrial developments due to well known problems such as high peak-to-average power ratio (PAPR), and sensitivity to time and frequency synchronization errors. The first paper of this category, “Performance analysis of MCDD in an OBP satellite communications system” by S. Kim and D. Yoon, looks at the performance of two multi-carrier demodulators, multistage multi-carrier demultiplexer and polyphase FFT, in the presence of quantization and phase errors and provide some useful design guidelines for on-board processing (OBP) application. The second paper entitled “OFDM receiver for fixed satellite channel” by N. Thomas et al., examines an OFDM waveform with a minimum overhead cyclic prefix structure to maximize spectral efficiency and a two-stage time and frequency synchronization technique. The proposed waveform could potentially be used for fixed satellite service with high spectral efficiency under minimum inter-symbol interference condition.

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Another selected paper in this special issue that addresses the PAPR problem for single-carrier VSAT system, but can also be applied to multi-carrier SATCOM system, is “Magnitude modulation for VSAT’s low back-off transmission” by M. Gomes et al. It investigates magnitude modulation (MM) as a technique to control the envelope power peaks caused by root-raised cosine (RRC) filtering and thus reduce high power amplifier (HPA) back-off. A proposed technique called multi-stage polyphase magnitude modulation (MPMM) is used to show significant reduction in HPA back-off, with potential real-time application using simple multi-rate filter coefficients.

2. Quality of Service (QoS) in Satellite Networks. In the current Internet the number of multimedia applications is continuously growing and as a consequence the total amount of traffic that must be managed is dramatically increased. Moreover, applications such as media streaming, content delivery distribution, and broadband access require a network infrastructure that offers larger bandwidth and guaranteed service levels. With the growing of new applications, “best effort” service is inadequate and results in lack of user satisfaction. For this reason QoS issues are extremely important. In fact, the special issue includes two papers about this research topic. The first work is “QoS-oriented solutions for satellite broadcasting systems” by A. Vargas et al. considers specific QoS mechanisms for satellite broadcasting systems. In more detail the paper deals with the analysis of different methods for constructing a satellite broadcasting system with different levels of QoS in the framework of the DVB–SH standards. The work also extends the proposed solutions to the case of multidimensional constellations. The second work in the QoS framework is entitled “Adaptive call admission and bandwidth control in DVBRCS systems” by M. Marchese and M. Mongelli. The paper studies a protocol and a control architecture aimed at implementing bandwidth and call admission optimization over a DVB return channel satellite terminal (RCST) under QoS constraints. The approach can be applied in all cases where traffic flows, coming from a terrestrial portion of the network, are merged together within a single DVB flow, which is then forwarded over the satellite channel. The proposed performance investigation shows promising performance, validated under heterogeneous conditions and a real fading trace.

3. Error Recovery and Synchronization Methods. Concerning Error Recovery approaches, the coded ARQ technique for satellite broadcast/multicast systems is also selected for publication in this special issue. The paper entitled “A simple coded ARQ for satellite broadcasting” by G. Liva et al., introduces a novel efficient coded ARQ technique, similarly to fountain coding, for satellite broadcast/multicast systems, which permits to limit the retransmissions by broadcasting linear combinations of the requested packets. The paper derives a lower bound on the average number of retransmissions and show that the proposed simple algorithm almost achieves the lower bound. The algorithm allows the users to recover the source packets iteratively by means of simple back-substitutions, hence with much lower complexity with respect to fountain schemes based on maximum Likelihood decoders.


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The paper “Error probability expressions for frame synchronization using differential correlation” by W. Sung addresses a topic of quite wide relevance in the field of frame/spreading code initial synchronization in presence of large frequency errors. Differential integration has become in fact widely used in modem design despite the lack of closed formulas for assessing the performance. This paper aims at filling such gap by providing closed formulas for assessing both the density probability of the differential detector output and, hence, for computing the detector false alarm and miss detection probability.

4. Security Issues. During the last years, the information security within the network and Internet plays a crucial role and the research in that field grows constantly. Recently, the same concepts are now applied to satellite communication systems. The importance in this field is not only referred to military applications but also to governmental missions for peaceful scientific projects such as earth observation or planetary exploration. Related to this framework, the paper “A strongly secure identity based authenticated key exchange protocol for satellite communication” by Y. Zhong and M. Jianfeng has been included in the special issue. In more detail, the paper presents an identity based authenticated key exchange (AKE) protocol for building secure channel in satellite communication. The authors demonstrate that the proposed protocol is suitable for satellite communication for two reasons: Like many previous identity based AKE schemes, the proposed protocol obtains high computation efficiency; for each session the protocol requires only two rounds of message sending: More would be highly inefficient in long-delay network such as the satellite ones.

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Igor Bisio got his “Laurea” degree, in Telecommunication Engineering, at the University of Genoa, Italy in 2002 and his Ph.D. degree in “Information and Communication Sciences” at the University of Genoa in 2006. He is currently Assistant Professor and he is Member of the Telecommunication Research Group and, in particular, of the Digital Signal Processing (DSP) and Satellite Communications and Networking (SCNL) Laboratories research staffs at the University of Genoa. During his research activity, he is collaborating, in the framework of research projects with several industries in the ICT field, with SMEs and he is also technical consultant of several public bodies. He is also a ComSoc IEEE Member since 2004 and he is currently Vice-Chair of the IEEE Satellite and Space Communications Technical Committee. He is author of more than 60 scientific papers including international journals, international conferences and book chapters. He is recipient of several International Best Paper Awards. He has organized Special Issues of International Journals and Magazines and is Technical Committee Chair of many international conferences. His main research activities concern resource allocation and management for satellite communication systems, optimization algorithms and architectures for satellite sensor networks, advanced controls for interplanetary networks, signal processing over smartphones, context and location awareness, adaptive coding mechanisms, indoor localization, safety and e-health applications.

Riccardo De Gaudenzi was born in Italy in 1960. He received his Doctor Engineer degree (cum Laude) in Electronic Engineering from the University of Pisa, Italy in 1985 and the Ph.D. from the Technical University of Delft, The Netherlands in 1999. From 1986 to 1988, he was with the European Space Agency (ESA), Stations and Communications Engineering Department, Darmstadt (Germany) where he was involved in satellite telecommunication ground systems design and testing. In particular, he followed the development of two new ESA's satellite tracking systems. In 1988, he joined ESA’s Research and Technology Centre (ESTEC), Noordwijk, The Netherlands where in 2000 he has been appointed head of the Communication Systems Section and since 2005 he is head of the RF Payload and Systems Division. The division is responsible for supporting the definition and development of advanced satellite system, subsystems and related technologies for telecommunications, navigation and earth observation applications. In 1996, he spent one year with Qualcomm Inc.,


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San Diego USA, in the Globalstar LEO project system group under an ESA fellowship. His current interest is mainly related with efficient digital modulation and multiple access techniques for fixed and mobile satellite services, synchronization topics, adaptive interference mitigation techniques and communication systems simulation techniques. He actively contributed to the development and the demonstration of the ETSI S-UMTS Family A, DVB-S2 and DVB-SH standards. From 2001 to 2005, he has been serving as Associate Editor for CDMA and Synchronization for IEEE Transactions on Communications. He is co-recipient of the 2003 and 2008 Jack Neubauer Memorial Award Best Paper from the IEEE Vehicular Technology Society. He is listed in the Who’s Who in the World 2008, 2010, and 2011 editions as well in the Who’s Who in Science and Engineering 2011.

Hung Nguyen has been working in the field of communications and signal processing for more than 25 years, with several published papers and patents in both areas. He has been a member of various technical committees in IEEE ComSoc, served in many ICC and Globecom conferences and symposia, most recently as leading Co-Chair of the Signal Processing Symposium for Globecom 2010. Currently, he holds the position of Vice-Chair of the Signal Processing and Communications Electronics (SPCE) Technical Committee in ComSoc. He was with a number of industrial companies such as ENSCO, Combustion Engineering, Raytheon, Orincon, Booze Allen Hamilton, ManTech and MedAcoustics before joining The Aerospace Corporation in Chantilly, VA where he is currently an Associate Director in the Engineering and Technology Group and provides technical direction and subject matter experts in the areas of wireless and optical communications, detection and estimation theory, modulation and coding theory, and networking for US government customers. He received his B.S.E.E. degree from the University of Maryland, an M.S. in Computer Science from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, and Ph.D. from George Mason University where he was also a Visiting Research Scientist in Array Signal Processing, and Adjunct Professor teaching wireless and multimedia communications. He was a recipient of several industrial awards and patents and is an IEEE Senior Member.

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Fotini-Niovi Pavlidou received the Diploma degree in Mechanical/Electrical Engineering and the Ph.D. degree from the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki (AUTh), Greece, where she is currently engaged as a full professor in teaching and research on network design and performance evaluation, QoS of mobile and satellite communications and multimedia applications over the Internet. She is the author of more than 150 papers in international journals and conferences. She has been involved in various editorial activities, she is a reviewer for book publishers, reviewer for research projects funded by various organizations. She is permanently included in the Technical Program Committee of many IEEE conferences and has been the organizer and Technical Program Chair of a number of conferences. She has served as external Advisor for the promotion of many academics worldwide. She is involved in many European and National Projects, she has been the Delegate of Greece in the European COST Program on Telecommunications (1998-2004) and served as Chairperson for the COST262 Action "Spread Spectrum systems and techniques for wired and wireless Systems". She currently serves as the national Delegate of Greece in the FP7 Cooperation Program in the ICT theme. She is a Senior Member of IEEE (Communications and Vehicular Technology Society), currently chairing the Joint VTS and AES Greece Chapter.

Takaya Yamazato is a professor at the Institute of Liberal Arts and Sciences, Nagoya University, Japan. He received the Ph.D. degree from Department of Electrical Engineering, Keio University, Yokohama, Japan, in 1993. From 1993 to 1998, he was an Assistant Professor in the Department of Information Electronics, Nagoya University, Japan. From 1997 to 1998, he was a visiting researcher of the Research Group for RF Communications, Department of Electrical Engineering and Information Technology, University of Kaiserslautern. In 1998, he gave a 1/2 tutorial entitled “Introduction to CDMA ALOHA” at Globecom held in Sydney Australia. Since then, he has been serving as a TPC member of Globecom and ICC. In 2006, he received the IEEE Communication Society 2006 The Best Tutorial Paper Award. He served as a Co-Chair of Wireless Communication Symposia of ICC2009 and he is a Co-Chair of Selected Areas in Communication Symposia of ICC2011. From 2008 to 2010, he served as a chair of Satellite Space and Communication Technical Committee. He is an Editor in Chief of Japanese Section of IEICE Transaction on Communications. His research interests include satellite and mobile communication systems, visible light communication, and ITS.