OURSES project, French acronym for Offer of Services Rural Use using Satellite, proposes three telemedicine applications linked to services for elderly people. It focuses particularly on the use of satellites as a complement to terrestrial technologies to ensure the deployment of tele-services in areas where telecommunication infrastructure is lacking. This paper describes the three telemedicine applications which can be viewed as tele-monitoring systems for elderly people.

This paper presents the recent results of SCA project (Communication Systems for Avionics), on the evaluation of the means of communication able to ensure airlines companies needs on airport platforms. Exchange of AOC/AAC (Aeronautical Operational Control/ Aeronautical Administrative Communication) messages between aircrafts and their airline companies is required on the ground. The concept of technology readiness level is presented to lead to the best choice of wireless technology. Evaluation of each technology is described for various scenarios of aircraft location within the airport.

This thesis studies classifcation of digital linear and nonlinear modulations using Bayesian methods. Modulation recognition consists of identifying, at the receiver, the type of modulation signals used by the transmitter. It is important in many communication scenarios, for example, to secure transmissions by detecting unauthorized users, or to determine which transmitter interferes the others. The received signal is generally affected by a number of impairments. We propose several classifcation methods that can mitigate the effects related to imperfections in transmission channels. More specifcally, we study three techniques to estimate the posterior probabilities of the received signals conditionally to each modulation. The first technique estimates the unknown parameters associated with various imperfections using a Bayesian approach coupled with Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods. A second technique uses the Baum Welch (BW) algorithm to estimate recursively the posterior probabilities and determine the most likely modulation type from a catalogue. The last method studied in this thesis corrects synchronization errors (phase and frequency offsets) with a phase-locked loop (PLL). The classifcation algorithms considered in this thesis can recognize a number of linear modulations such as Quadrature Amplitude Modulation (QAM), Phase Shift Keying (PSK), and nonlinear modulations such as Gaussian Minimum Shift Keying (GMSK).

The pseudo maximum likelihood estimator allows one to estimate the unknown parameters of Brown’s model for altimeter wave- forms. However, the optimality of this estimator, for instance in terms of minimizing the mean square errors of the unknown para- meters is not guarantied. Thus it is not clear whether there is some space for developing new estimators for the unknown parameters of altimetric signals. This paper derives the Crame ́r-Rao lower bounds of the parameters associated to Brown’s model. These bounds provide the minimum variances of any unbiased estima- tor of these parameters, i.e. a reference in terms of estimation er- ror. A comparison between the mean square errors of the standard estimators and Crame ́r-Rao bounds allows one to evaluate the po- tential gain (in terms of estimation variance) that could be achieved with new estimation strategies.

Several telemedicine applications are proposed within the frame of OURSES project, French acronym for Offer of Rural Use of Services by Satellite, providing services for elderly people. The main objective of this project is to show the interest of using satellites as a complement to terrestrial technologies, in areas where telecommunication infrastructure is lacking or incomplete. This paper describes one of these applications: an ECG monitoring system. This telemonitoring system allows, thanks to a wireless wearable sensor, to detect possible cardiac problems of elderly people. ECG signals are analyzed through signal processing algorithms and if some abnormal condition is detected, an alarm is raised and sent via satellite to the physician's office. The corresponding physician is able to access at any time the recorded ECG signals, whenever he is willing to, in the presence of an alarm or not. This allows a constant monitoring of the elderly people. Tests realized in a real environment have demonstrated the feasibility and the interest of this application.

This paper addresses the problem of classifying altimetric waveforms backscattered from different kinds of surfaces including oceans, ices, deserts and forests. Appropriate features associated with altimetric radar waveforms are first introduced for this classification. These features are completed by radiometer temperatures and pre-processed using a linear discriminant analysis for dimensionality reduction. The classification of altimetric waveforms is finally achieved using the resulting pre-processed vector with reduced dimension. Different classification strategies are finally considered. These strategies are based on the nearest mean rule, the nearest neighbor method or on the multilayer perceptron. Various simulation results illustrate the performance of the proposed classifier.

This paper studies a Bayesian algorithm for estimating the parameters associated to Brown's model. The joint posterior distribution of the unknown parameter vector (amplitude, epoch and significant wave height) associated with this model is derived. This posterior is too complex to obtain closed form expressions of the minimum mean square error and the maximum a posteriori estimators. We propose to sample according to this distribution using an hybrid Metropolis within Gibbs algorithm. The simulated samples are then used to estimate the unknown parameters of Brown's model. The proposed strategy provides better estimations than the standard maximum likelihood estimator at the price of an increased computational cost.

Assessing the quality of a hyperspectral image is a difficult task. However, this assessment is required at different levels of the instrument design: evaluation of the signal to noise ratio necessary for a particular application, determining the acceptable level of losses from compression algorithms for example. It has been shown previously that a combination of five quality criteria can provide a good evaluation of the impact of some degradation on applications, such as classification algorithms for example. This paper refines this concept, providing a representation of the degradation which allows predicting the impact on applications.

The current Transformation of the military networks adopts the MANET as a main component of the tactical domain. Indeed, a MANET is the right solution to enable highly mobile, highly reactive and quickly deployable tactical networks. Many applications such as the Situational Awareness rely on group communications, underlying the need for a multicast service within the tactical environment where the MANET is employed as a transit network. The purpose of this thesis is to study the setting up of an optimal multicast service within this tactical environment. We firstly focus on defining the protocol architecture to carry out within the tactical network paying particular attention to the MANET. This network is interconnected with different types of networks based on IP technologies and implementing poten- tially heterogeneous multicast protocols. The tactical MANET is supposed to be made of several hundred of mobile nodes, which implies that the scalability is cru- cial in the multicast protocol architecture choice. Since the concept of clustering proposes interesting scalability features, we consider that the MANET is a clus- tered network. Thereby, we define two multicast routing protocols adapted to the MANET: firstly STAMP that is in charge of the multicast communications within each cluster and secondly SAFIR that handles multicast flows between the clusters. These two protocols that can be implemented independently, act in concert to pro- vide an efficient and scalable multicast service for the tactical MANET. Then, we study the interoperability of these multicast protocols employed within the MANET with those employed in the heterogeneous networks that it is interconnected with in order to guarantee end-to-end seamless multicast services to users. Finally, since the multicast protocols proposed in this thesis rely on underlying unicast routing protocols, we propose, in the last chapter, a scalable unicast routing protocol based on OLSR.