Secure and Efficient Support for DVB-S2/DVB-RCS2 System with Distributed Gateways

Communications-on-the-move (COTM) is becoming an indispensable feature for next generation satellites. Many commercial and government based satellite communications programs are including support for terminal mobility as a key feature. Adding COTM capabilities to regenerative (non-transponded) satellite systems, such as layer-2 and layer-3 switching satellites impacts the satellite system, network and protocol architecture and design. The unique challenges and complications arising from supporting COTM capabilities can impact all segments of a satellite communications program, including ground stations, satellites, and terminals. In this paper, we examine the key aspects associated with implementing mobile satellite services (MSS) for next generation regenerative satellites which were originally designed to support fixed satellite services (FSS). We identify common challenges that arise when architecting a mobile regenerative satellite communications system and show methods to successfully address them. In particular, we focus on the SPACEWAY satellite system and show how COTM can be supported through enhancement to the baseline architecture. SPACEWAY was originally designed to support commercial fixed satellite service. SPACEWAY implements the European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI) Regenerative Satellite Mesh-A (RSM-A) air interface standard and complies with the ETSI Broadband Satellite Multimedia (BSM) Satellite Independent Service Access Point (SI-SAP). This will serve as a blueprint for standards based RSM-A systems and the concepts can be extended to other non-standards based regenerative satellite systems as well.

European standardisation, a key institution for the functioning of the EU single market, functions at the crossroads of private rule-making and public policy. Recently, it has been subjected to fierce scrutiny by the European Commission and the European Court of Justice. Expressed concerns relate to the legal value of standards and the legitimacy of institutions creating them but have broader implications for European competitiveness, highlighting the strategic role of standards. By far much of this critique has been directed towards the European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI), the EU’s crown jewel of technology standardisation. ETSI’s normative power manifests itself in policymaking, legislation and market processes, rendering it an interesting organisation to study as a proxy to understand the legitimacy and resilience of European standardisation. Against this backdrop, this introduction sets the theoretical and legal context for this Special Issue. Upon discussing the background and dynamic of European standardisation, it provides a theoretical framework for ‘crises' and ‘legitimacy’, tailoring it to the particular case of ETSI and the challenges it faces at the policy and judicial level. Lastly, it provides a critical reflection on the Research Articles in this Special Issue, linking them to the current discourses on legitimacy and resilience.

SummaryThe distributed nature of wireless mesh networks (WMNs) allows them to benefit from multiple autonomic functionalities. However, the existing landscape of self‐x solutions (eg, self‐configuration) is fragmented and the lack of a standardized framework through which interoperable autonomics can be developed has been hampering adoption and deployment of autonomics in real‐world service networks. There is a need for a standardized architectural framework that enables to comprehensively support and integrate interoperable components for autonomicity in WMNs. Such an architecture (autonomicity‐enabled wireless mesh architecture) is currently being standardized by the working group called Evolution of Management towards Autonomic Future Internet (AFI) in the European Telecommunications Standards Institute within the Network Technologies Technical Committee. The proposed autonomic wireless mesh architecture is an instantiation of the AFI GANA (Generic Autonomic Network Architecture) reference model, a standards‐based approach to autonomics. This paper complements and extends the early version of the architecture by further detailing the architectural principles and providing experimental and validation results. First, we provide a brief overview of the AFI GANA reference model and then show how each of its building blocks can be instantiated for WMNs. We evaluate the proposed architecture by implementing and testing the 4 basic self‐x functionalities defined by the GANA model. The provided guidelines can now help researchers and engineers build autonomicity‐enabled WMNs using a standardized framework that enables adoption and deployment of autonomics by industry, thereby enabling researchers and engineers to contribute to the further evolution of the standard in the European Telecommunications Standards Institute.

The background to, analysis and specification of a standard generic interface for the configuration of services on main telephone switching elements are described. This includes the specification of services on analog, integrated services digital network (ISDN), and Centrex lines. An emerging international standard - the European Telecommunications Standards Institute, Customer Administration Model - is employed. >

WITHDRAWN: Ultra-secure transmissions for 5G-V2X communications

The broadband integrated services digital network (BISDN) will become the ubiquitous network of the future, which will be required to support a wide range and complex set of services to the end user. In order for a network operator to provide a full service network to all its customers it will be necessary to provide the full range of broadband ISDN services to end users connected to the broadband local exchange (BLE) via a broadband access network (BAN) which will replace part or the whole of the local line distribution network. To ensure that the full range of services can be delivered by the BAN to the end users in a consistent and correct manner, the Council of the European Commission (CEC) have given the European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI) a mandate to define an ATM (i.e. cell) based interface between the BAN and BLE which will be called Vb5. The ETSI have produced a technical requirement which will form the framework for the detailed specification of Vb5. Vb5 shall be capable of supporting narrowband services, symmetrical and asymmetric broadband services and broadcast services. The paper describes the major capabilities and features of the Vb5 interface by focusing on the general architecture, service architecture, protocol stack and BAN/BLE configurations. The paper recommends that the narrowband stepping stones of V5.1 and V5.2 are progressively rolled out into the network to lay the foundations for the support of Vb5 and to build operational experience in the support of V5 interfaces. (12 pages)

The current front-end for distributed speech recognition (DSR) systems provided by European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI) is mainly based on the state-of-the- art MFCC features. The method proposed in this paper aims to improve the performance of the present ETSI DSR-XAFE (XAFE: extended Audio Front-End). For this purpose two sets of acoustical features namely formant-like features and MFCC features are integrated under the multi-stream framework to form a feature vector which is more robust against additive noise. It is shown that for noisy speech, combining cepstral coefficients with main spectral peaks also known as formant-like features, using the multi-stream framework, leads to significant improvement in word recognition accuracy relative to word accuracy obtained for MFCCs alone.

This paper examines the impact of Vehicle-to-Everything (V2X) communications on vehicle cooperation, focusing on increasing the robustness and feasibility of Cooperative, Connected, and Automated Vehicles (CCAVs). V2X communications enable CCAVs to obtain a holistic environmental perception, facilitating informed decision making regarding their trajectory. This technological innovation is essential to mitigate accidents resulting from inadequate or absent communication on the roads. As the importance of vehicle cooperation grows, the European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI) has been standardizing messages and services for V2X communications, in order to improve the synchronization of CCAVs actions. In this context, this preliminary work explores the use of Maneuver Coordination Messages (MCMs), under standardization by ETSI, for cooperative path planning. This work presents a novel approach by implementing these messages as well as the associated Maneuver Coordination Service (MCS) with a Cooperative Driving System to process maneuver coordination. Additionally, a trajectory approach is introduced along with a message generation mechanism and a process to dynamically handle collisions. This was implemented in an Artery V2X simulation framework combining both network communications and SUMO traffic simulations. The obtained results demonstrate the effectiveness of using V2X communications to ensure the safety and efficiency of Cooperative Intelligent Transportation Systems (C-ITS).

New cellular networks like 5G and 6G put novel methods and technologies forth which sustainably change the mobile communication domain. Edge cloud computing is one of these emerging technologies providing computational resources at the edge of the network in closer proximity to end users. It promises significantly reduced network latencies, better load balancing, and more precise optimizations through information about the states of the access networks provided by the cloud infrastructure, e.g., radio conditions, location information, and others. The European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI) has summarized and standardized the requirements for a multi-access edge computing (MEC) architecture as basis for future implementations. Among others, the standard defines a large number of interfaces between the various components and to the environment. It also formulates security requirements for these interfaces. However, the implementation details are usually left to the platform operators. In this paper, we present an in-depth analysis of the privacy properties of these interfaces and point out several potential privacy vulnerabilities. We describe three possible attacks that exploit these vulnerabilities. For our analysis, we use a simulative edge computing sandbox environment that has been developed by ETSI to investigate the interfaces. As a conclusion, we formulate recommendations on how data protection requirements can be met in future MEC implementations.

This paper is an attempt to present the current status of VSAT systems in Europe, based on two aspects.1. The first part describes the actions conducted by the European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI) for issuing proper technical standards. It is also explained how these standards are included in the general framework of the European legislation, the purpose of which is to create the conditions for a really open telecommunications market all over Europe, and more particularly to favour the implementation of independent (private) satellite communications networks, mainly for corporate services on a free competition basis, both as concerns operators and manufacturers.2. The second part gives an overview of the actual implementation of VSAT networks in Europe and of the expected market trends.

The development of the Core INAP CS-2 standard and the corresponding conformance test suites by expert teams at the European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI) are historical breakthroughs for the use of SDL and MSC within the international telecommunications standardization process. For the first time, the textual description of a standard has no priority over the corresponding SDL specification. The power of a standard SDL specification has been shown by the successful application of computer aided test generation methods for the production of the necessary standard conformance test suites. This paper introduces the Core INAP CS-2 protocol specification and describes the test generation procedure.

Many cooperative applications designed to improve road safety rely on the frequent exchange of awareness messages among vehicles. Therefore, under high vehicle density, the channel medium is expected to get congested. To tackle this situation, the European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI) specified a set of Decentralized Congestion Control (DCC) mechanisms that adapt the transmission parameters based on channel load measures. Due to some concerns about its effectiveness and stability, DCC and its overall philosophy are currently being revised and extended: all in all, DCC deserves additional investigations. For this purpose, in this paper a simulation analysis is presented, aiming at enriching the insight into the DCC behaviour, under a variety of channel load conditions and through the definition of both link- and application-layer performance metrics. Achieved results show that the DCC techniques are not really effective with the currently specified parameters settings; hence some hints are given to improve their performance.

The separation of call and bearer to support future teleservices and services in broadband networks is outlined in this paper. Various mechanisms to undertake the separation are overviewed and the method chosen by the International Telecommunications Union (ITU) and the European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI) is described in detail. A full protocol model for broadband access signalling is derived and explained from the basic steps leading through to the establishment of an association between end-points supporting call control information flows. The call control protocol, currently being developed to establish, maintain and clear a call with more than one connection, is outlined and illustrated by information flows.

This chapter discusses the environmental assessment of telecommunications switching centers (telephone exchanges), based on the experience gained by Climate Associates Limited (CAL) and K8T on contracts in the UK and Ireland over the last few years. CAL has been asked to assess the energy efficiency of telephone exchanges and make recommendation on how their energy efficiency could be improved. Although we are not able to disclose details that may be commercially in confidence, this chapter draws out some general principles on the energy efficiency of telecommunications switching centers, taking into account the electricity demand of the equipment, the energy performance of the buildings housing it, the air conditioning needed to cool it, and the electrical systems used to power it, with a focus on how this could be improved. Reference is made to assessment standards such as ITU-T L.1310 Energy efficiency measurement and metrics for telecommunication network and ITU-T L.1300 Best Practices for Green Data Centers. Dr. Keith Dickerson and Dr. David Faulkner have both been active in the development of standards for environmental assessment in the European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI) and the International Telecommunications Union (ITU) over the past 10 years and hold leadership positions in these bodies. Dr. Paul Kingston has an excellent track record in the modeling and assessment of power consumption to optimize design of the built environment. Acknowledgement is given to BT for permission to publish the results of this study. The results are based primarily on the study of a single telephone exchange and may not be valid for all exchanges of this type in the UK.

Platooning, which is the idea of cars autonomously following their leaders to form a road train, has huge potential to improve traffic flow efficiency and, most importantly, road traffic safety. Wireless communication is a fundamental building block: It is needed to manage and maintain the platoons. To keep the system stable, strict constraints in terms of update frequency and communication reliability must be met. We investigate different communication strategies by explicitly taking into account the requirements of the controller, exploiting synchronized communication slots, and transmit power adaptation. As a baseline, we compared the proposed approaches to two state-of-the-art adaptive beaconing protocols that have been designed for cooperative awareness applications, namely, the European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI) Decentralized Congestion Control (DCC) and Dynamic Beaconing (DynB). Our simulation models have been parameterized and validated by means of real-world experiments. Our results demonstrate that the combination of synchronized communication slots with transmit power adaptation is perfectly suited for cooperative driving applications, even on very crowded freeway scenarios.