Aerial base stations with opportunistic links for next generation emergency communications

Rapidly deployable and reliable mission-critical communication networks are fundamental requirements to guarantee the successful operations of public safety officers during disaster recovery and crisis management preparedness. The ABSOLUTE project focused on designing, prototyping, and demonstrating a high-capacity IP mobile data network with low latency and large coverage suitable for many forms of multimedia delivery including public safety scenarios. The ABSOLUTE project combines aerial, terrestrial, and satellites communication networks for providing a robust standalone system able to deliver resilience communication systems. This article focuses on describing the main outcomes of the ABSOLUTE project in terms of network and system architecture, regulations, and implementation of aerial base stations, portable land mobile units, satellite backhauling, S-MIM satellite messaging, and multimode user equipments

MyEcoCost - forming the nucleus of a novel environmental accounting system: vision, prototype and way forward

The innovative software system "myEcoCost" enables to gather and communicate resource and environmental data for products and services in global value chains. The system has been developed in the consortium of the European research project myEcoCost and forms a basis of a new, highly automated environmental accounting system für companies and consumers. The prototype of the system, linked to financial accounting of companies, was developed and tested in close collaboration with large and small companies. This brochure gives a brief introduction to the vision linked to myEcoCost: a network formed by collaborative environmental accounting nodes collecting environmental data at each step in a product's value chains. It shows why better life cycle data are needed and how myEcoCost addresses and solves this problem. Furthermore, it presents options for a future upscaling of highly automated environmenal accounting for prodcuts and services

Performance Assessment of an S-band Return Link for Messaging and Mobile Interactive Broadcasting

Within this paper we examine the performance in terms of aggregate MAC throughput of the return link of a messaging and mobile interactive broadcast system in S-band. More specifically, an analysis is done to investigate the impact of using two different air interfaces (synchronous and asynchronous access) within the same bandwidth on the instantaneous MAC throughput within one beam. All considerations take into account a realistic population density as well as the propagation envrionment and a linguistic pattern over Europe

Optimization of Robust Header Compression for Aeronautical Communication

The ceaselessly growing requests for communication capacity in the aeronautical sector will soon result in an excess of the current Air Traffic Control (ATC) capacity limitations. To cope with this issue, current research activities, such as the EU FP7 SANDRA project, investigate new seamless IPv6-based network solutions which integrate the different aeronautical services. These solutions will generate a significant protocol overhead due to all the required network functionalities. Within this paper, the focus is on the insertion of RObust Header Compression (ROHC) in the SANDRA architecture to reduce the protocol overheads. Performance evaluations for the usage of ROHC in the aeronautical context are provided and a strong emphasis of this work is put on a discussion on how ROHC parameters can be optimized for operational aeronautical communication

On the Behavior of RObust Header Compression U-mode in Channels with Memory

The existing studies of RObust Header Compression (ROHC) have provided some understanding for memoryless channel, but the behavior of ROHC for correlated wireless channels is not well investigated in spite of its practical importance. In this paper, the dependence of ROHC against its design parameters for the Gilbert Elliot channel is studied by means of three analytical models. A first more elaborated approach accurately predicts the behavior of the protocol for the single RTP flow profile, while a simpler, analytically tractable model yields clear and insightful mathematical relationships that explain the qualitative trends of ROHC. The results are validated against a real world implementation of this protocol. Moreover, a third model studies also the less conventional yet practically relevant setting of multiple RTP flows

A delay model for satellite constellation networks with inter-satellite links

Within this paper we examine a non-geostationary satellite constellation network with inter-satellite links (ISLs) for global air traffic control (ATC) and air passenger communication (APC). More specifically, an analysis is done to investigate the impacts of different routing policies on the end-to-end delay, and a general model describing the delays is developed. All considerations are based on a Galileo-like satellite constellation network and real global flight data of all commercial flights during one day

A Simple Analytical Model for RObust Header Compression in Correlated Wireless Links

RObust Header Compression (ROHC) has been successfully included in some wireless standards in order to reduce the excessive IP overhead for small packets, for instance Voice over IP frames. So far, there is limited understanding on how the ROHC performance depends on the design parameters and the characteristics of the wireless channel. In this paper we propose an analytical model that provides simple expressions for the probability of losing synchronization as a function of the mentioned parameters, and also yields insightful relationships between the design variables and the desired system performance. The results are validated against sophisticated and realistic models of ROHC