Guest Editorial: IJSCN Special Issue on ASMS2008

Abstract

The ASMS conference has become a recognized event for industry and research institutions to exchange up-to-date information about recent advances and emerging technologies in the field of mobile satellite communication systems. In addition, following the successful path opened by the 2006 edition, the scope of the conference has been widened to include broadband and broadcast satellite systems. This is very important not only because the major part of the satcom market belongs to broadcasting and broadband access operators but also fundamentally because the convergence of broadcast, mobile and fixed satellite communications is essential to offer seamless connectivity anywhere at anytime, which is recognized as the key element for the successful deployment of future satellite systems.This Issue collects the extended versions of eight of the best papers presented at the ASMS 2008 Conference. The papers have been selected with the aim of providing an insight in the developments and findings in this exciting field. The first paper shows that Low Density Parity Check (LDPC) codes can tightly approach the performance of ideal maximum 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 decoding algorithms which exploit the sparseness of the parity-check matrix to reduce the complexity of Gaussian elimination. The second paper includes a review and characterization of possible data link technologies for aeronautical communications covering a vast range of terrestrial (direct air-to-ground) and satellite-based solutions, with the final goal to identify suitable candidates for a future integrated aeronautical network based on IPv6 protocol, supporting both cockpit and cabin communications [2]. A new method to enable IPsec authentication and integrity services at the network layer is proposed in the third paper [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 and large latency. Stemming from the three-state land mobile satellite channel model used for physical layer simulation in the course of the DVB-SH standardization process, an improved model is proposed in the fourth paper [4]. The new model includes two major modifications: a reduction in the number of states and