Guest Editorial: IJSCN Special Issue on ASMS2008

Abstract

This Special Issue of the Wiley International Journal of Satellite Communications and Networking hosts aselection of papers from the fourth Advanced Satellite Mobile Systems (ASMS) Conference, held inBologna, Italy, on 26–28 August 2008. The conference was organized through a joint effort of theUniversity of Bologna, the Institute of Communications and Navigation of DLR (German AerospaceCenter) and the ISI (Integral SatCom Initiative) European Technology Platform, in cooperation with theSatellite Communications Network of Excellence (SatNEx) and the sISI Specific Support Action,supported by the European Commission FP6 and FP7 programmes, respectively.The ASMS conference has become a recognized event for industry and research institutions to exchangeup-to-date information about recent advances and emerging technologies in the field of mobile satellitecommunication systems. In addition, following the successful path opened by the 2006 edition, the scope ofthe conference has been widened to include broadband and broadcast satellite systems. This is veryimportant not only because the major part of the satcom market belongs to broadcasting and broadbandaccess operators but also fundamentally because the convergence of broadcast, mobile and fixed satellitecommunications is essential to offer seamless connectivity anywhere at anytime, which is recognized as thekey element for the successful deployment of future satellite systems.This Issue collects the extendedversions of eight of the best papers presented at the ASMS 2008 Conference. The papers have been selectedwith the aim of providing an insight in the developments and findings in this exciting field. The first papershows that Low Density Parity Check (LDPC) codes can tightly approach the performance of idealmaximum distance separable codes over memoryless erasure channels, under Maximum Likelihood (ML)decoding [1]. The decoding complexity of ML decoding can be kept low thanks to a class of decodingalgorithms which exploit the sparseness of the parity-check matrix to reduce the complexity of Gaussianelimination. The second paper includes a review and characterization of possible data link technologies foraeronautical communications covering a vast range of terrestrial (direct air-to-ground) and satellite-basedsolutions, with the final goal to identify suitable candidates for a future integrated aeronautical networkbased on IPv6 protocol, supporting both cockpit and cabin communications [2]. A new method to enableIPsec authentication and integrity services at the network layer is proposed in the thirdpaper [3]. Target scenarios include satellite multicast for large-scale delivery of data and video content.In these scenarios, a cross-layer architecture can mitigate the effects of physical layer impairments andlarge latency. Stemming from the three-state land mobile satellite channel model used for physical layersimulation in the course of the DVB-SH standardization process, an improved model is proposed in thefourth paper [4]. The new model includes two major modifications: a reduction in the number of states and