So strong is this trend that the present era of the Information Age might be considered the beginning of a Connected Age . Enhancing connectedness is a theme that runs throughout this General Papers issue, and it is a primary goal of the work described in the papers grouped in this section on fixed and mobile access networks.
This volume and section begins with "RadioStar: Providing Wireless Coverage Over Gigabit Ethernet." Its authors present the architecture, implementation, and testing of a system designed to address the challenge of remaining wirelessly connected within the indoor environments of enterprises, public spaces, and residences. This flexible solution, which is now being brought to market, incorporates an advanced active distributed antenna system that transports digitized radio signals between the base station and remote antennas over Gigabit Ethernet links supported by twisted-pair or fiber-optic cable.
How can satellite-based digital video broadcast and other streaming services be provided to mobile users' handheld devices with high quality in the face of signal fading? In a pair of companion papers, the authors of "MPE-IFEC: An Enhanced Burst Error Protection for DVB-SH Systems" and "Efficient Repair Mechanism of Real-Time Broadcast Services in Hybrid DVB-SH and Cellular Systems" address avoiding video frame freeze, degradation, and lag with a pair of complementary approaches. In the former of these works, a modified method for interleaved coding to improve the link power budget is described and analyzed. In the latter, impairments such as deep signal fading are ameliorated via a new algorithm that assesses the