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4th International ICST Conference on Personal Satellite Services
22nd – 23rd March 2012
Bradford, United Kingdom
www.psats.eu
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CALL FOR PAPERS - last chance to submit your paper!

The PSATS conference is a premier international forum for discussions, bringing together academic and industrial researchers, practitioners, and students interested in future techniques relating to the satellite communications, networking, technology, systems and applications

IMPORTANT DATES
Paper Submission: 18th November 2011 - EXTENDED DEADLINE
Paper Acceptance: 15th December 2011
Camera Ready Paper: 31st January 2012

SCOPE AND TOPICS
The next generation satellite services will cater the demands of personal services by bringing the satellite terminals directly to the hands of the user. Technological advances in satellite communications have made it possible to bring such value added satellite services directly to the user by reducing the overall cost as well as addressing many technological challenges such as achieving mobility, having miniaturized antennas and terminal sizes, and providing high data rate links. With the unique broadcast nature and ubiquitous coverage of satellite networks, the synergy between satellite and terrestrial networks provides immense opportunities for disseminating wideband multimedia services to a wide range of audiences over large numbers of geographically dispersed people. It is evident that the satellite will play a complementary, but essential, role in delivering multimedia and telecommunication services to infrastructure-less region where the terrestrial high-bandwidth communication infrastructures are practically unreachable. In such a context we introduce a new category claimed to be defined as Personal Satellite Services (PSATS) by means of extending the satellite services directly to the user for personal services such as communications, multimedia and location identification. Such opportunities are also currently fueling accelerated research in PSATS enabled systems which we cover in this conference. The services enabled by PSATS not only cover the requirements of an ordinary citizen but also provide defense personal services such as tracking, visualization and virtualization in a highly secure communication environment.

The conference will consist of diverse technical tracks:

General Track
- Satellite antenna designs, modulation and coding
- Synchronization, equalization and channel estimation
- Channel modeling for satellite communications
- MIMO communications for satellites
- Interference detection and mitigation techniques
- DVB and broadband access technologies
- Networking topologies for broadband over satellite links
- IP over satellite and QoS support
- Reliable multicast protocols, transport protocol over satellite
- Onboard switching and processing Delay tolerant networking
- Radio resource management and packet scheduling
- Power control, hand-over issues and call admission control
- Emerging standardizations and issues
- Satellite navigation systems, services and tracking
- Real-time multimedia streaming, broadcast/multicasting
- QoS and RRM in the integrated satellite-WSN architecture
- Security related issues of satellite communications

Value added services and future systems
- Voice, broadband Internet, DVB, positioning
- Infrastructure and network management
- IP over satellite and heterogeneous networks
- Quality of Service (QoS) issues
- Ka-band and emerging frequency bands
- Earth observation
- Emergency service assistance

Convergence of Satellite System and Emerging Technologies
- Convergence with Terrestrial, Wireless Access, and Sensor Networks
- Cooperative/distributed network architectures
- Quantum satellite communications
- Convergence with optical networks

Special Session on Satellite Technologies for Cloud-based Services
Special session on Satellites for Aeronautical Communications

Confirmed Keynote Speaker: Dr. Surendra Pal, Professor & Senior Adviser, Satellite Navigation, Indian Space Research Organisation, India and Enrico Saggese President of the Italian Space Agency, Italy

PUBLISHING
Accepted papers will be published in Springer's LNICST series and will appear in the SpringerLink, one of the largest digital libraries online that covers a variety of scientific disciplines, as well as in the ICST's own EU Digital Library (EUDL).
LNICST volumes are submitted for inclusion to leading indexing services, including DBLP, Google Scholar, ACM Digital Library, ISI Proceedings, EI Engineering Index, CrossRef, Scopus.
Best Paper and Best Student Paper awards will be granted to authors of the best papers.

SUBMISSION
Regular and invited papers are allowed up to 6 pages with an absolute maximum of 8 pages, including all figures, tables and references. Papers must be formatted using Springer LNICST Authors' Kit. The paper submission system is now open. Please visit www.psats.eu for more details on submission guidelines.
For detailed submission instructions please see: http://www.psats.eu/2012/submission.php

COMMITTEE
General Chairs
Dr Prashant Pillai (University of Bradford, UK)
Prof Rajeev Shorey (NIIT University, India)

TPC Chairs
Dr Erina Ferro (ISTI-CNR, Pisa, Italy)
Dr Neeli R. Prasad (Aalborg University, Denmark)

Steering Committee
Prof Imrich Chlamtac (Create-Net, Italy)
Dr Kandeepan Sithamparanathan (RMIT, Australia)
Mr Agnelli Stefano (ESOA/Eutelsat, France)
Prof Mario Marchese (University of Genoa, Italy)

Advisory Committee
Dr Giovanni Giambene (University of Siena, Italy)
Prof Fun Hu (University of Bradford, UK)
Dr Vinod Kumar (Alcatel-Lucent, France)
Prof Joerg Ott (Aalto University, Finland)

Industrial Chair
Mr Paul Febvre (Inmarsat, United Kingdom)

Publicity Chair
Dr Tomaso De Cola (German Aerospace Center DLR, Germany)

Exhibitions Chair
Dr. Ana Yun Garcia (Thales Alenia Space, Spain)

Publications Chair
Dr Constantinos T. Angelis (TEIE, Greece)

Local Organising Chairs
Dr Yongqiang Cheng (University of Bradford, UK)
Dr Kai Xu (University of Bradford, UK)

Conference Coordinator:
Ms Aza Swedin (EAI, Italy)

Website Chair
Dr Kostas Kotsopoulos (University of Bradford, UK)

Technical Program Commitee
Dr Roberto Di Pietro (University of Rome, Italy)
Prof Gorry Fairhurst (University of Aberdeen, UK)
Dr Anand Prasad (NEC Corporation, Japan)
Prof Carlo Caini (University of Bologna, Italy)
Dr Matteo Berioli (German Aerospace Center (DLR), Germany)
Dr Alberto Gotta (ISTI-CNR, Italy)
Dr Raffeallo Secchi (University of Aberdeen, UK)
Prof Laurent Franck (Télécom Bretagne, France)
Prof Franco Davoli (CNIT, Italy)
Dr Paolo Barsocchi (ISTI-CNR, Italy)
Dr Petia Todorova (Fraunhofer Institut FOKUS, Germany)
Dr Carles Fernandez-Prades (CTTC, Spain)
Dr Gabriele Oligeri (ISTI-CNR, Italy)
Dr Ajay Kulkarni (Cisco Systems, USA)
Dr Marco Cello (University of Genoa, Italy)
Dr Alexey Vinel (SPIIRAS, Russia)
Prof Fabio Dovis (Politecnico di Torino, Italy)
Prof Igor Kotenko (SPIIRAS, Russia)
Dr Alban Duverdier (CNES, France)
Dr Cesare Roseti (University of Rome, Italy)
Dr Anton Donner (German Aerospace Center (DLR), Germany)
Dr Bernhard Collini-Nocker (University of Salzburg, Austria)
Dr Aaditeshwar Seth (IIT Delhi, India)
Prof Fun Hu (University of Bradford, UK)
Dr Athanasios Panagopoulos (ICCS-NTUA, Greece)
Dr Nedo Celandroni (ISTI-CNR, Italy)
Prof Michele Luglio (University of Roma2, Italy)
Dr Haitham Cruickshank (University of Surrey, UK)
Prof Maria Luisa Merani (University of Modena & Reggio Emilia, Italy)
Dr Philip A. Dafesh (The Aerospace Corporation, USA)

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