S-MIM: a novel radio interface for efficient messaging services over satellite

This article presents a radio interface recently standardized by ETSI under the name of S-band Mobile Interactive Multimedia (S-MIM) and especially designed to provide ubiquitous messaging services over S-band GEO satellites using low-power terminals. Thanks to low terminal cost and high bandwidth efficiency, this standard allows the development of new satellite services, particularly for vehicular and machine-to machine applications. The S-MIM standard relies on a broadcasting radio interface such as DVB-SH or ETSI SDR in the forward link, and reuses 3GPP W-CDMA technology properly adapted to the scope in the return link. Thanks to the use of spread spectrum ALOHA, terminals can access the channel in a totally asynchronous manner. The use of a packet-optimized iterative successive interference cancellation (i- SIC) algorithm at the receiver allows exploiting the inherent power imbalance among terminals in order to boost the throughput with respect to conventional SSA systems. In addition, advanced packet transmission control techniques have been adopted to maximize the probability of successful packet reception in the challenging land mobile satellite channel. Finally, the S-MIM link layer provides efficient and reliable transport of IP datagrams over the forward and return link radio interfaces.