PSATS - International ICST Conference on Personal Satellite Services 2012

The next generation satellite services will cater the demands of personal services by bringing the satellite terminals directly to the hands of the user hence providing satellite personal services directly to 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 explore such techniques, and aims to serve as a premier international forum for discussions, bringing together academic and industrial researchers, practitioners, and students interested in future techniques relating to the satellite comm