Adaptive coding and modulation techniques for next generation hand-held mobile satellite communications

In the last years we are seeing the increasing presence of multimedia applications together with a wide variety of terminals, from the PCs to the notebooks, from the smartphones to the tablets. In order to exploit such advanced services, ubiquitous and broadband connections are required. While urban or suburban areas can be covered by using terrestrial wireless broadband networks, there are several rural or low populated areas with narrowband access. To this aim, satellite community has developed in the last years two communications standards specifically suited for mobile communications, i.e., DVB-SH and DVB-RCS NG. Among others they consider adaptive waveforms techniques for increasing the system reliability and throughput aiming to exploit the variable channel behavior. Adaptive coding and modulation (ACM) belongs to this family of algorithms, by adapting the modulation and coding scheme based on the channel behavior. In this paper we focus on a state adaptive algorithm suited for mobile applications.