A high throughput does not necessarily translate to a good Quality of Experience, especially in a satellite context. The round trip time, for instance, also has a tremendous impact on the reactivity of applications and thus on the Quality of Experience. Content delivery networks are massively used for over‐the‐top services in terrestrial network: They reduce the load of network and the delay as they draw the content closer to the end user. In a satellite system, the content delivery network presents a good opportunity for enhancing the end users' Quality of Experience and can change the conventional use of performance‐enhancing proxies. This paper investigates the satellite as access link for home networks or a backhaul link for small cells for a 5G perspective. We analysed the impact of caching on both gateway side and satellite terminal side for 2 on‐trend services: web browsing and adaptive video streaming (dynamic adaptive streaming over HTTP). The main contribution is an evaluation of transparent caching through a satellite platform. The caching policy is out of the scope of this paper. One large part of the testbed is based on an open‐source platform, OpenSAND that emulates the satellite system. To confirm the results, some real experiments have been conducted on a commercial satellite link. As expected, the transparent caching at the satellite terminal side can increase the Quality of Experience to its upper border as long as the content is available in the cache. For the satellite gateway cache, the performances exceed the expectations. Although the application experiences the satellite delay in this case, the traversal time of different Internet service provider networks also delays the delivery of content. Then it may have a greater impact on reactivity than the satellite itself. Through careful analysis of the different results, we noticed some issues. Transparent caching is unable to cache encrypted or dynamic content. Moreover, a misuse of caching can provoke bad behaviour of dynamic adaptive streaming over HTTP mechanisms and severely decrease the Quality of Experience. We designed a solution that in addition to solving the issue, alleviates the storage space of satellite terminal caches.

Machine-Type Communications are meeting a growing interest on the consumer market. Dedicated technologies arise to support more robust communications involving a massive number of low cost, low energy-consuming devices This paper discusses the coverage extension of a Low-Powered Wide Area Network using a Low Earth Orbit satellite constellation, benefiting from the improved performance of a recent standard. The transmission complies with the user equipment specifications standardized as NB-IoT by 3GPP in Release 13. This radio technology is an update on LTE standard with enhanced performances : the supported path loss can be 20 dB higher than with legacy LTE. This improvement makes satellite-compatible the small and energy-constrained devices. A specific unidirectional system is defined, and a link budget is derived. Also, a receiver architecture is presented, that takes into consideration satellite channel specific impairments.

Aujourd’hui, le satellite géostationnaire propose à ses clients un accès Internet haut débit (de l’ordre de 20Mbit/s). Cependant le délai induit engendre une baisse de réactivité pour la plupart des applications. En particulier, le protocole de streaming vidéo adaptatif DASH ne parvient pas à s’y adapter. Au contraire, il sous-évalue les capacités du réseau et fournit le service minimal disponible. Pour réduire les délais, le CDN rapproche les données de l’utilisateur final grâce à la mise en place de caches. Ce service a fait ses preuves pour la navigation web et le téléchargement de fichiers dans Internet. Cet article propose d’analyser l’impact du CDN pour un service de streaming vidéo adaptatif et dans un contexte satcom, deux points qui, ensemble, divergent de l’utilisation habituelle du CDN. De cette première analyse, nous pouvons différentier trois situations. La première propose des performances optimales. Dans la deuxième, le CDN n’apporte rien. Enfin, dans la dernière situation, le CDN a un impact néfaste sur les performances. Ces deux derniers cas sont induits par une mauvaise politique de mise en cache qui leurre le client DASH sur les qualités à demander. Nous résolvons ce problème par le déploiement d’un proxy transparent indiquant les qualités disponibles dans les caches.

In the sake of modernization, aviation stakeholders decided that the future aviation network infrastructure, in particular for air-ground communica- tion systems, will move towards IP based networks. It has been referred to in the International Civil Aviation Organization as Aeronautical Telecommunication Network/Internet Protocol Suite. Due to the heterogeneous communication envi- ronment, it is necessary to support handover between different access technolo- gies and access networks. In this article, we first define the very specific aero- nautical communication environment. Our main contribution is a performance assessment of the most deployed network protocols capable of managing IP mo- bility within the aeronautical environment. We focus our analysis on the Mobile IPv6 protocol and implementation issues of a representative aeronautical network in Omnet++.

As Internet usages expand quickly, access networks are modernized with new technologies like fiber-optic communications. However, upgrade costs are prohibitive in sparsely populated areas, the latter turning notably towards satellite connection. Indeed, this technology allows deploying a high-throughput Internet access quickly in these regions. Nevertheless, GEO satellites induce a long delay, not experienced on terrestrial infrastructures despite their low throughput. In this paper, we consider a heterogeneous network with both a satellite and a terrestrial path. This kind of architecture is known to be difficult to operate because of the important differences between used technologies. The emerging MP-TCP transport protocol, whose design enables to aggregate disparate paths properly, brought new hopes for heterogeneous networks. However, it does not take user Quality of Experience (QoE) into account as it focuses on maximizing the links occupancy. This paper propose an intelligent path selector using the content size to maximize users QoE in heterogeneous networks. Before detailing this method, we describe the architecture able to retrieve the size of delivered contents thanks to Content Delivery Network Interconnection (CDNI). Finally, we implement a testbed to evaluate the behavior of the proposed routing method. The results show a significant improvement of the delivery performance, outperforming MP-TCP.

The return link of broadband satellite systems has recently received more attention due to the spread of multi-beam antennas which enable spatial frequency reuse, and thus increase drastically the number of users that can potentially be served by one satellite. While interference isolation has so far been the way to go, with regular four-color frequency reuse scheme, there is a growing interest in densifying the frequency usage as is being done in cellular networks. In this paper, we address the return link radio resource allocation challenges, from spectral resource allocation to user scheduling, including modulation and coding scheme (MODCOD) selection. Our contributions highlight the potential gains of a two-color scheme and shed light on several levers to reap its benefits through interference management. We first consider the possibility to use a two-color scheme, while keeping the MODCOD selection and the scheduling local to each beam and we show that even though it yields a potential performance gain (+16%) with respect to the state of the art (SoA) (based on four colors), it is not viable due to a very high-block loss rate. Therefore, we propose a simple-yet fast and efficient-coordinated MODCOD selection process that alleviates the need of estimating interference and reduces drastically decoding failures. This coordination step offers significant gains (+58%) over the SoA, while leaving the per beam scheduler unchanged. Finally, we formulate a joint user scheduling and MODCOD selection problem across all beams and propose an offline heuristic to solve it efficiently. We obtain a 83% gain with respect to the SoA, but with higher computational complexity. Still, it confirms the great potential of coordinated scheduling.

In the current framework of Galileo and thanks to the flexibility of the I/NAV message, introducing new pages in order to propose an optimization of the E1-B Galileo signal has been proposed [1]. This optimization process pursues two different objectives. The first objective aims to reduce the Time To First Fix (TTFF), achieved by shortening the time to retrieve the Clock and Ephemerides Data (CED). The second objective aims to improve the resilience and robustness of the CED, particularly under hostile environments. Under the backward compatibility precondition, new outer channel error correction solutions for Galileo I/NAV are proposed in this paper. Especially, a new family of codes called Lowest Density Maximum Distance Separable codes (LD-MDS) is proposed to be used in this paper, thus in GNSS context. This family of codes, along with an enhanced performance decoding method based on the use of a soft serial iterative decoding, provides an optimal solution in order to reduce the TTFF as well as to improve the robustness of the CED.

Optical wavelengths are an alternative to radio-frequency links for future satellite-to-ground transmissions. They are envisioned in the framework of payload/telemetry data transfer (optical downlinks from LEO satellites) or communication (bi-directional optical links with GEO satellites). However, as it propagates through the atmosphere, the optical wave can be deeply affected by atmospheric turbulence which induces randomspatial and temporal variations of its amplitude and phase. Variations in amplitude translate into fluctuations of the collected power (scintillation). The phase distortions affect the spatial distribution of the power at the focal plane of the telescope causing deleterious losses when the incident flux needs to be coupled to an optoelectronic detector or to a single-mode optical fiber. Such losses result in dynamical attenuations of the received signal-called fading- and hence potentially to the loss of information. The most recent feasibility studies highlight the use of two types of fading mitigation techniques : adaptive optics systems and digital techniques (coding and interleaving). To limit the complexity and cost of such systems, the optimization of these mitigation techniques should be conducted jointly. The main objective of this thesis is therefore the investigation of the complementarity of physical (adaptive optics) and digital data reliability mechanisms (interleaving, correcting and erasure codes in a cross-layer approach).

Optical wavelengths are an alternative to radio-frequency links for future satellite-to-ground transmissions. They are envisioned in the framework of payload/telemetry data transfer (optical downlinks from LEO satellites) or communication (bi-directional optical links with GEO satellites). However, as it propagates through the atmosphere, the optical wave can be deeply affected by atmospheric turbulence which induces randomspatial and temporal variations of its amplitude and phase. Variations in amplitude translate into fluctuations of the collected power (scintillation). The phase distortions affect the spatial distribution of the power at the focal plane of the telescope causing deleterious losses when the incident flux needs to be coupled to an optoelectronic detector or to a single-mode optical fiber. Such losses result in dynamical attenuations of the received signal -called fading- and hence potentially to the loss of information. The most recent feasibility studies highlight the use of two types of fading mitigation techniques : adaptive optics systems and digital techniques (coding and interleaving). To limit the complexity and cost of such systems, the optimization of these mitigation techniques should be conducted jointly. The main objective of this thesis is therefore the investigation of the complementarity of physical (adaptive optics) and digital data reliability mechanisms (interleaving, correcting and erasure codes in a cross-layer approach).