Hybrid Satellite/Terrestrial Cooperative Relaying Strategies for DVB-SH based Communication Systems

The integration of satellite and terrestrial systems in a hybrid network permits to benefit from both systems, overcoming the drawbacks of a Non-Line-Of-Sight (NLOS) propagation. The purpose of this paper is to study simple cooperative relaying strategies which rely on the introduction of the Delay Diversity (DD) technique in a DVB-SH compliant hybrid satellite/terrestrial network with the aim of improving the performance of the network. The application of this strategy represents a promising solution to guarantee communication also in public emergency situations, such as the ones caused by fire, earthquake, flood or explosion. We investigated the pros and cons of the proposed scheme, comparing the assumptions which are required and the simulation results with respect to the satellite-only and the terrestrial-only systems.