Cooperative satellite to land mobile gap-filler-less interactive system architecture

Considerable efforts are being made in the area of interactive satellite broadcast services to mobiles, which range from the development of specific communication standards to the realization of practical proof-of-concept prototypes. The main reasons for such a big interest lie in the fact that interactive satellite services are a large potential market with many possible applications. Frequent and long-lasting shadowing caused by surrounding buildings in urban and suburban scenarios greatly limits system availability. The common approach to solve the problem consists in deploying fixed gap fillers, which imply a great consumption of economic and bandwidth resources. In the present paper we propose a novel hybrid satellite-terrestrial system architecture in which cooperative communication techniques are extensively adopted in order to reduce the number of gap-fillers needed to get a target system availability. Nodes are meant to have both networking and satellite communication capabilities so that each of them can possibly act as a Mobile Gap-Filler (MGF).