Cooperative Strategies of Integrated Satellite/Terrestrial Systems for Emergencies

In this paper some simple cooperative relaying strategies which rely on the exploitation of the Delay Diversity technique and the Maximal Ratio Combining (MRC) receive diversity algorithm are proposed for a DVB-SH compliant hybrid satellite/terrestrial network. These strategies are investigated in a public emergency scenario where the adoption of an integrated heterogeneous network combined with the cooperative diversity techniques guarantees the connection between the incident area and the external areas: particularly, the drawbacks of the Non-Line-Of-Sight (NLOS) propagation are mitigated. The NAV/COM capabilities of the cooperative DD algorithm in a DVB-SH Single Frequency Network (SFN) are discussed, highlighting the suitability of these schemes in emergency situation management. A comparison analysis of the proposed schemes is performed, describing the assumptions required and the simulation results with respect to the satellite-only and the terrestrial-only cases.