Cooperative Coverage Extension in Vehicular Land Mobile Satellite Networks

We study the application of random linear network coding (RLNC) for cooperative coverage extension in land mobile satellite (LMS) vehicular networks. We perform an analytical assessment of the limits of cooperation in the presence of both a satellite and a terrestrial repeater (gap filler). Using the max-flow min-cut theorem, we derive exact expressions and closed-form lower bounds on the coverage in a setup of practical interest. Furthermore, we propose a practical implementation of the RLNC cooperative approach for the Digital Video Broadcasting-Satellite services to Handheld (DVB-SH) standard. We evaluate numerically the performance of the proposed protocol using a simulator based on physical-layer abstraction (PLA) and widely adopted propagation channel models for both the satellite and the terrestrial segments. Our simulation results show that the proposed scheme extends the coverage with respect to a system in which simple cooperative relaying is used, making a more efficient use of the terrestrial channel resources. In addition, the proposed solution can help keep a relatively low outage probability while limiting the number of required gap fillers.