Invited Lectures

In a SatCom system, a Mission Control Centre (MCC) is a set of functionalities which have two main objectives. Firstly, to ease the operation of the system (space and ground segment), then to benefit the maximum capacity of the payload and ground devices. As a consequence, the mission centre has to be considered as an efficient mean to increase the return of the investment made by the satellite operator.
Moreover, all the operators want to have integrated Mission Control Centre for global consistency, by proposing a merged planning, configuration and monitoring system
The main function addressed by a Mission Control Centre are :
Planning : to check feasibility of a deployment, and optimize on board and ground resources consumption, in order to enhance the system capacity.
Configuration : to deploy easily payload and station accordingly to what have been planned.
Monitoring : to check if the operation are in line with the plan and also to detect potential threat on ongoing transmission activities.
Thales Alenia Space has a long history in development and supply of Mission Control Centers for commercial and institutional Satcom missions

During the last decade, SatCom market is facing the introduction of new features, associated to the increasing needs of capacity, reliability and flexibility. Consequently the in-orbit validation, operation, planning  and resource optimization of such systems becomes more and more complex, hence requiring to develop new operating concepts and tools.
These new features are mainly :
IP services with variable data-rate,
Ka Band bringing bandwidth improvement but also important fading.
Complex wave-form with adaptive coding and modulation.
Flexible payload increasing deployment possibilities with multi-beams, shared TWTA, Digital Transparent Processor (DTP)…
And for governmental systems, the struggle against Jamming threats either at monitoring and planning level or through the use of specialized anti-jamming devices.

The aim of this presentation is to give an overview on the new functions that had to be added to Mission Control Centre during last ten years in order to take up the challenge induced by these new technologies. We will see how new ground function have escorted these major change, and maybe more, how they had made some of these changes possible. Because, some of them wouldn’t have been a reality without the development of a dedicated ground software helping a non expert operator to plenty use them.

Philippe Noel
Mission Control Center Thales Alenia Space

Philippe NOEL received his engineer diploma from the “Institut Universitaire des Sciences Pour l’Ingénieur de Marseille” in 1993 and his master in computing sciences from “Ecole des Mines de Saint Etienne” in 1994.
He integrated Thales group in 1995 where he made a 16 years long carrier completely dedicated to Network Management Systems.
Since 2003, Philippe Noel has participated exclusively to the realization of important Satellite Telecommunication Systems. These projects were ARISTOTE and SYRACUSE 3 for the French MOD (Ministry of Defence), NATO EMS (NATO EPM Modem System), NATO ASNMC (Acquisition of Advanced Satcom Network Monitoring and Control. More recently he works on a dual military and commercial C/KA/KU Satcom sytem developed by Thales and Astrium for United Arab Emirates : YAHSAT.
During this period Philippe Noel was successively : developer, designer, technical manager, work package and project manager.
He is now in charge for the Telecom Business Unit of Thales Alenia Space of the Mission Control Center product line.

Christian Schlegel
University of Alberta, Edmonton, Canada

Christian Schlegel received the Dipl. El. Ing. ETH degree from the Federal Institute of Technology, Zürich, in 1984, and the M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in electrical engineering from the University of Notre Dame, Notre Dame, IN, in 1986 and 1989, respectively.
In 1988 he joined the Communications Group at the research center of Asea Brown Boveri in Baden, Switzerland, where he was involved in mobile communications research. He spent the 1991/92 academic year as Visiting Assistant Professor at the University of Hawaii at Manoa, Hawaii. From 1992-1994, he was head of the Mobile Communications Research Centre at the University of South Australia, Adelaide, then, from 1994-1996 he was with the University of Texas at San Antonio, and in 1996 he joined the University of Utah, Salt Lake City. In 2001 he assumed the iCORE Chair for Digital Communications at the University of Alberta, Edmonton, Canada. His interests are in the area of error control coding and applications, multiple access communications, iterative processing, digital communications, wireless networks, as well as low-power implementations of communications systems. He is the author “Trellis Coding” (IEEE Press 1997), “Trellis and Turbo Coding,” (Wiley/IEEE 2004), and co-authored “Coordinated Multiple User Communications,” Springer in 2006 with Professor Alex Grant from the University of South Australia. Dr. Schlegel received an NSF 1997 Career Award in support of his research in multiuser communications, a Canada Research Chair in 2001, and a Province of Alberta iCORE Chair in 2001 and 2006, providing a total of $5 Mio of research funding. Dr. Schlegel is an IEEE Fellow, and was named IEEE Distinguished Lecturer of the IEEE Circuits and Systems Society in 2007 and for the IEEE Vehicular Technology Society in 2011.
Dr. Schlegel was associate editor for coding theory and techniques for the IEEE Transactions on Communications from 1999-2007, guest editor for the Proceedings of the IEEE’s Proceedings of the IEEE’s special issue on turbo coding, and currently serves on the editorial board of Editorial Board of the Journal of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Hindawi Publishing. Dr. Schlegel also served as technical program co-chair of the IEEE Information Theory Workshop 2001 held in Cairns, Australia, as technical program chair of the IEEE International Symposium on Information Theory (ISIT’05) 2005 held in Adelaide, Australia, as technical co-chair of the 4th IEEE Multiple Access Workshop (MACOM) 2011, and as general chair of the 2005 IEEE Communication Theory Workshop (CTW’05) held in Park City, Utah. He has also frequently serves on several technical program committees, most recently or IEEE VTC’99 in Houston, TX, IEEE VTC’2000 held in Tokyo, Japan, IEEE Globecom 2001 held in San Antonio, TX, the 3rd International Symposium on Turbo Codes, held in Brest, France, in 2003, IEEE VTC’2004-Fall held in Los Angeles, IEEE Globecom 2004 held in Dallas, TX. IEEE VTC’2006 held in Melbourne, IEEE ICC 2006 held in Istanbul, Turkey, IEEE IWCMC 2006, held in Vancouver, IEEE PIMRC 2006 held in Helsinki, Finland, IEEE VTC 2007, Spring, held in Dublin, IEEE VTC 2007, Fall, held in Baltimore, IEEE Globecom 2007, held in Washington, DC, IEEE PIMRC 2007, held in Athens, Greece, IEEE VTC 2008, held in Calgary, the 5th International Symposium on Turbo Codes, held in Lausanne, Switzerland, 2008, the Military Communications Conference MILCOM 2008, held in San Diego, November 2008, IEEE VTC 2009, held in Barcelona, Spain, the 6th International Symposium on Turbo Codes, to be held in Brest, France, September 6-10, 2010, and the 3rd International Workshop on Multiple Access Communications held in Barcelona, September 13-14, 2010, MILCOM 2010, held in San Jose, November 2010, MILCOM 2011, to be held in Baltimore, November 2011, and IEEE ICC 2012 to be held in Ottawa, Canada in June 2012.
Dr. Schlegel is the originator and organizer of the Western Canadian Summer School on Information and Communication Theory held every year in Banff, Alberta, and currently in its 5th year. He also organizes an annual undergraduate student event on wireless principles at the University of Alberta.
Dr. Schlegel has published over 100 technical papers, and have given numerous invited talks and seminars. He received research grants for over 1 Mio US$ from the National Science Foundation, the Army Research Office, the State of Utah, and private industry, notably L3 Communications in Salt Lake City, Utah, and more than 6 Mio Can$ from iCORE, the Canadian Foundation for Infrastructure (CFI), NSERC, ASRA, the Canada Research Chair (CRC) program, and the wireless industry in Canada. His work with industry has resulted in ten patents in the area of spread spectrum communication, error control coding, and digital and analog implementations. He has pioneered multi-user detection based on interference separation principles and iterative decoding methods. He frequently holds tutorials on Turbo Coding and Multiple Access Communications. Further information and instructional material is available on his University laboratory.

As an introduction, this talk gives an overview over the essential physical phenomena of the satellite communications channel. Then it describes measurement and modelling techniques for the land mobile satellite channel and gives an overview over this field. The characteristics of the land mobile satellite channel are discussed, and “historic” DLR channel measurements are reviewed. From this, a narrowband channel model is derived, and parameters of the channel model, resulting from measurements, are presented. Finally, a four-state model for dual satellite channel diversity is introduced.

Erich Lutz
Head of the Digital Network Section – DLR

Erich Lutz received the Dipl.-Ing. degree from the Technical University Munich in 1977 and the Dr.-Ing. degree from the Univer­sity of the Armed Forces, Munich in 1983. Since then, he has been with the Institute of Communications and Navigation of the German Aerospace Center (DLR) in Oberpfaffenhofen, Germany, and from 1986 until 2008, he was head of the Digital Network section of this institute. He has participated in a large number of international studies and research projects. Since 2006, he has been coordinator of the SatNEx Satellite Communications Network of Experts funded first by the European Commission and now by the European Space Agency.His research interests include networking aspects in mobile and broadband satellite communication systems. Prof. Lutz has published numerous journal and conference papers, and is the principal author of a book on satellite systems for personal and broadband communications, published by Springer in 2000. He holds a honorary professorship at the Technical University Munich where he lectures on satellite communication networks. Prof. Lutz is a member of the Editorial Panel of the International Journal of Satellite Communications.

Bernard H. Fleury
Department of Electronic Systems 
University of Aalborg, Denmark

Bernard H. Fleury received the diploma in electrical engineering and mathematics in 1978 and 1990, respectively, and the Ph.D. degree in electrical engineering from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich (ETHZ), Switzerland, in 1990.

Since 1997, he has been with the Department of Electronic Systems, Aalborg University, Denmark, as a Professor of communication theory. He is the Head of the Section Navigation and Communications, which is one of the nine laboratories of this department. From 2006 to 2009, he was a Key Researcher with the Telecommunications Research Center Vienna (ftw), Austria. During 1978–1985 and 1992–1996, he was a Teaching Assistant and a Senior Research Associate, respectively, with the Communication Technology Laboratory, ETHZ. Between 1988 and 1992, he was a Research Assistant with the Statistical Seminar at ETHZ.

Prof. Fleury’s research interests cover numerous aspects within communication theory and signal processing, mainly for wireless communications. His current research interests include stochastic modeling and estimation of the radio channel especially for MIMO applications in fast time-varying environments, iterative message-passing processing with focus on the design of efficient feasible architectures for wireless receivers, localization techniques in wireless terrestrial systems, and radar signal processing. He has authored and co-authored more than 110 publications in these areas. He has developed with his staff a high-resolution method for the estimation of radio channel parameters that has found a wide application and has inspired similar estimation techniques both in academia and in industry.

Michael Devetsikiotis
IEEE Communication Society Distinguished Lecturer 2008-2011
Professor and Director of Graduate Programs, Dept. of Electrical and  Computer Engineering
NC State University, Raleigh, North Carolina, U.S.

Michael Devetsikiotis (IEEE S 1985, M 1994, SM 2003, F 2012) was born in Thessaloniki, Greece. He received the Dipl. Ing. degree in Electrical Engineering from the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece, in 1988, and the M.Sc. and Ph.D. degrees in Electrical Engineering from North Carolina State University, Raleigh, in 1990 and 1993, respectively. As a student he received scholarships from the National Scholarship Foundation of Greece, the National Technical Chamber of Greece, and the Phi Kappa Phi Academic Achievement Award for a Doctoral Candidate at NC State University. He is a senior member of the IEEE and a member of the honor societies of Eta Kappa Nu, Sigma Xi, and Phi Kappa Phi.
In 1993 he joined the Broadband Networks Laboratory at Carleton University, Ottawa, Canada, as a Post-Doctoral Fellow. Michael later became an Adjunct Research Professor in the Dept. of Systems and Computer Engineering at Carleton University in 1995, an Assistant Professor in 1996 and an Associate Professor in 1999. He joined the Dept. of Electrical and Computer Engineering at NC State as an Associate Professor, in 2000, and became a Professor in 2006.
Michael served as Chairman of the IEEE Communications Society Technical Committee on Comm. Systems Integration and Modeling and is now a member of the ComSoc Education Board. He has served as an Associate Editor of the IEEE Comm. Letters, an Area Editor of the ACM Transactions on Modeling and Computer Simulation, and on the editorial boards of the Intl. Journal of Simulation and Process Modeling, the IEEE Comm. Surveys and Tutorials, and the Journal of Internet Engineering. He co-chaired the Next Generation Internet symposium under IEEE ICC 2002, the High-Speed Networks symposium under IEEE ICC 2004, the Quality, Reliability and Performance Modeling (QRPM) symposium under IEEE ICC 2006, and the Quality, Reliability and Performance for Emerging Network Services symposium under IEEE Globecom 2006. He served as Workshops Chair for IEEE Globecom 2008, and co-chair of the workshops on “Enabling the Future Service Oriented Internet” (2007, 2008 and 2009). He co-chaired the QRPM Symposium under IEEE Globecom 2010, and IEEE CAMAD 2011, in Kyoto. He will co-chair the QRPM symposium at ICC 2012 in Ottawa, Canada.

Designing Smarter Networks: Modeling Communications in the Era of Service Awareness, Social Networks and the Smart Grid
Combined advances in high speed networking, mobile devices, application sharing, web services, virtual world technologies and large scale event processing are converging to create a new world of pervasive, smarter networks, and ubiquitous “presence” of users, which offers tremendous potential for social interaction and co-creation. The communication networking and computing requirements of this converged human-centric environment are also increasing at an accelerated pace. In this new environment, it is imperative that the crucial networking and computing resources align closely with the needs and patterns dictated by the applications, social networks, and by the human users. The success of such socio-technical smarter systems will hinge on the way networks interact with human presence and location, in all of its physical and virtual aspects.
A robust, scalable, and dynamic communication infrastructure is necessary to connect service consumers and providers within such rich, interactive environments. It is also becoming increasingly relevant to the delivery of smarter health systems, and of the “Energy Internet” or “Smart Grid”, in conjunction with progress in energy storage, renewable generation, and smart metering.  Applications of the future will leverage distributed service-oriented deployment patterns where large numbers of network appliances coordinate with peers using network-wide (or “cloud-wide”) application-specific policies, in order to perform configuration changes based on prevailing network, computing and application conditions.
Modeling and adaptation of resources based on state, location, context-awareness and workload (current or predicted) is highly desirable in these high-performance computing and communication socio-technical service systems. In this seminar, we provide an overview of our effort, in collaboration with our College of Management, with the new FREEDM center on renewable energy, with IBM and with Cisco, to develop models of emerging next generation network-based services, traffic characterization and predictive and dynamic resource allocation. We present an overview of approaches that we are using for service-aware utility-oriented modeling and resource allocation in aggregation network optimization, location-aware hybrid activities in wireless networks, smart grids and vehicle charging stations, smart health applications, and virtual collaboration environments such as virtual worlds.

Enrico Del Re

Enrico Del Re received the Laurea in Electronics Engineering from the University of Pisa, Italy, in 1971. After two years employed in industry on the design of attitude sensors for space applications, since 1975 he joined the Department of Electronics and Telecommunications Engineering of the University of Florence where currently is Full Professor of Digital Signal Processing. He was Director of the School for Higher-grade Electronics Technicians of the University of Florence in 1990-93. From 1994 to 2004 he has been Chairman of the Telecommunications Engineering Degree of the Faculty of Engineering of the University of Florence.
Since 2001 he is Member of the Executive Board of CNIT (Italian University Consortium for Telecommunications).
The professional and academic experience has been focused in the fields of the telecommunications systems and the digital processing of signals, where he has published 6 books, more than 300 papers in national and international journals and conferences and more than 40 technical research reports. He has been responsible of over 50 research contracts with the Italian National Research Council, Italian Space Agency, European Union and industries. He has been responsible as a Prime Contractor of a research contract with the European Space Agency in 1984‑86 on the application of advanced digital signal processing techniques on board the satellites.
During the academic year 1987‑88 he has been on leave from the University of Florence at the European Space Research and Technology Centre of the European Space Agency, Noordwijk, Netherlands, carrying out research on the integration of satellite systems with the terrestrial cellular network for mobile communications. He has been the Chairman of the EU COST Project 227 on “Integrated Space-Terrestrial Mobile Networks” and of the EU COST Action 252 “Evolution of satellite personal communications from second to future generation systems”. He has served as an expert for EU in the area of Advanced Communications Technologies. He has been the Chairman of the Satellite Integrated Communications Networks Workshop (1986), the Software