Tutorials

TU07: Mobile Broadcasting
Instructor: Giovanni Corazza and Alessandro Vanelli-Coralli, University of Bologna, Italy

Thursday 6 April 2006
9:00 – 12:30

Mobile broadcasting , intended as the delivery of multimedia content to mobile terminals, is today an extremely hot technical issue and market opportunity for both cellular operators and traditional broadcasters, investing both satellite and terrestrial communication networks communities. MB applications target horizontal mass-markets, and are expected to have a very important impact in terms of diffusion of value-added services. Several standards and technologies are being developed to take full advantage of this ripe opportunity, among which: MBMS within 3GPP, DVB-H in the DVB forum, S-DMB within the satellite community and the ETSI S-UMTS group. All of these standards pursue the identification of the optimum provision mechanism for multimedia broadcast services, while preserving compliance with existing system architectures and air interfaces. However, they all have advantages and disadvantages which render their mutual comparison a non-trivial task.

The tutorial aims at describing the various provision mechanisms for MB services, and addresses a comparison between the alternative competing solutions.

Participants will have the opportunity to learn:

Giovanni Corazza was born in Trieste (Italy) in 1964. He received the Dr. Ing. degree (summa cum laude) in Electronic Engineering in 1988 from the University of Bologna (Bologna, Italy), and a Ph.D. in 1995 from the University of Rome “Tor Vergata” (Roma, Italy). He is currently a Full Professor at the Department of Electronics, Computer Science, and Systems (DEIS) of the University of Bologna. He is responsible for the area of Wireless Communications inside the Advanced Research Centre for Electronic Systems (ARCES) of the University of Bologna. In the years 2000-2003, he held the Chair for Telecommunications inside the Faculty of Engineering. He is the Chairman of the Advanced Satellite Mobile Systems Task Force (ASMS‑TF), a European forum on satellite communications with more than 60 industrial partners, under the auspices of the European Commission and of the European Space Agency.

In the years 1989–1990 he was with the Canadian aerospace company COM DEV (Ontario), where he worked on the development of microwave and millimeter-wave components and subsystems. In the years 1991–1998 he was with the Department of Electronic Engineering at the University of Rome “Tor Vergata”, as a Research Associate. In November 1998 he joined DEIS–University of Bologna. During 1995 he visited ESA/ESTEC (Noordwjik, NL) as a Research Fellow. During 1996 he was a Visiting Scientist at the Communications Sciences Institute, University of Southern California (Los Angeles, CA). The same Institute invited him as a Visiting Professor to hold a graduate course on Spread Spectrum Systems in the fall of the year 2000. During the summer of 1999 he was a Principal Engineer at Qualcomm (San Diego, CA).

Prof. Corazza has research interests in the areas of communication and information theory, wireless communications systems (including cellular, satellite, and fixed systems), spread-spectrum techniques with emphasis on CDMA, synchronization and parameter estimation, MAC layer protocols, multicast protocols. He is author or co-author of more than 120 papers published in International Journals and Conference Proceedings. Since 1997, he joined the Editorial Board of the IEEE Transactions on Communications as Associate Editor for Spread Spectrum. He received the Marconi International Fellowship Young Scientist Award in 1995. He was co-recipient of the Best Paper Award at the IEEE Fifth International Symposium on Spread Spectrum Techniques & Applications, ISSSTA’98, Sept. 2-4, 1998, (Sun City, South Africa), and of the Best Paper Award at the IEEE International Conference on Telecommunications 2001, ICT2001, 4-7 June 2001, (Bucharest, Romania). He was co-recipient of the 2002 IEEE VTS Best System Paper Award for the paper entitled “Wide-Band CDMA for the UMTS/IMT-2000 Satellite Component”, published on IEEE Transactions on Vehicular Technologies in March 2002. He holds a patent on “Closed Loop Resource Allocation”, devoted to resource management for high data rate wireless networks. He chaired sessions and was member of the Technical Committee of several conferences, Chairman of the ASMS2004 Conference and of the upcoming IEEE ISSSTA 2008 Conference.

Alessandro Vanelli-Coralli was born in Bologna, Italy, in 1967. He received the Dr. Ing. Degree (summa cum laude) in Electronics Engineering and the Ph.D. in Electronics and Computer Science from the University of Bologna (Italy) in 1991 and 1996, respectively.

In 1996, he joined the Department of Electronics, Computer Science and Systems (D.E.I.S.) at the University of Bologna, where he is currently an Assistant Professor. Since 2001, he has also been a Research Associate of the Advanced Research Center for Electronic Systems (ARCES) of the University of Bologna. During 2003 he was a Visiting Scientist at Qualcomm Inc. (San Diego, CA). In 2004 he has been named Leader of the Research and Development work group of the Advanced Satellite Mobile Systems Task Force ( www.asms-tf.org ), an independent, industry-led body which counts more than 60 members and holds regular meetings to address all of the relevant thematic priorities for Mobile Satellite Systems support, such as market and business studies, regulatory and standardization issues, research, development and demonstration of technology, dissemination and publicity.

Alessandro Vanelli-Coralli is also a member of the Organization Committee of the IEEE International Spread Spectrum Techniques and Applications Conference 2008 and of the ASMS-TF Conference 2006. His research interests are in the area of spread spectrum communications, synchronization techniques, and digital signal processing. Dr. Vanelli-Coralli was co-recipient of the Best Paper Award at the IEEE ICT 2001 Conference, June 4-7, 2001, Bucharest, Romania