A survey of digital television broadcast transmission techniques

This paper is a survey of the transmission techniques used in digital television (TV) standards worldwide. With the increase in the demand for High-Definition (HD) TV, video-on-demand and mobile TV services, there was a real need for more bandwidth-efficient, flawless and crisp video quality, which motivated the migration from analogue to digital broadcasting. In this paper we present a brief history of the development of TV and then we survey the transmission technology used in different digital terrestrial, satellite, cable and mobile TV standards in different parts of the world. First, we present the Digital Video Broadcasting standards developed in Europe for terrestrial (DVB-T/T2), for satellite (DVB-S/S2), for cable (DVB-C) and for hand-held transmission (DVB-H). We then describe the Advanced Television System Committee standards developed in the USA both for terrestrial (ATSC) and for hand-held transmission (ATSC-M/H). We continue by describing the Integrated Services Digital Broadcasting standards developed in Japan for Terrestrial (ISDB-T) and Satellite (ISDB-S) transmission and then present the International System for Digital Television (ISDTV), which was developed in Brazil by adopteding the ISDB-T physical layer architecture. Following the ISDTV, we describe the Digital Terrestrial television Multimedia Broadcast (DTMB) standard developed in China. Finally, as a design example, we highlight the physical layer implementation of the DVB-T2 standar

Analysis and Simulation of the Signals Transmission in the DVB-H/SH Standards

Tato disertační práce se zabývá analýzou, simulací a měřením zpracování a přenosu signálů digitální televize pro příjem mobilního TV vysílání ve standardech DVB-H a DVB-SH. Tyto standardy vycházejí z předpokladu, že příjem signálu je charakterizován modely přenosových kanálů s vícecestným šířením. Tyto, tzv. únikové kanály, jsou charakterizovány hlavně zpožděním a ziskem jednotlivých cest. V závislosti na dalších parametrech (rychlost přijímače, Dopplerovské spektrum), je možné rozdělit únikové kanály do třech hlavních skupin: mobilní, přenosné a fixní. Dá se předpokládat, že v různých modelech kanálů bude přenášený signál různě ovlivněn. Proto je potřebné najít optimální parametry systémů (DVB-H/SH) pro kvalitní příjem vysílaných služeb mobilní televize, což je hlavním cílem této disertační práci. Pro tento účel byly vytvořeny dvě vhodné aplikace (jedna pro DVB-H a jedna pro DVB-SH) s GUI v prostředí MATLAB, které umožňují simulovat a analyzovat míru zkreslení signálu v případě mobilních, přenosných a fixních scénářů přenosu. Navíc, tyto aplikace obsahují i druhý samostatný simulátor pro nastavení a modifikaci parametrů jednotlivých přenosových cest. Díky tomu je možné zhodnotit vliv parametrů celého systému a kanálových modelů na dosaženou chybovost (BER a MER) a kvalitu přenosu. Ve všech přenosových scénářích (v závislosti na poměru C/N) byly získané, vyhodnocené a diskutované zkreslení signálů. Navíc, u standardu DVB-H, všechny získané výsledky ze simulací byly ověřeny měřením. Rozdíly mezi dosaženými výsledky (simulace a měření) byly rovněž podrobeny diskuzi. Tuto disertační práci je možné rozdělit do čtyř hlavních částí. První část disertační práce se zabývá rešerší současného vývoje v oblasti digitálního televizního vysílání na mobilní terminály ve standardech DVB-H/SH. Na konci této části jsou jasně popsány cíle této disertační práce. Druhá část práce je zaměřená na stručný popis blokového diagramu vysílačů v obou standardech DVB-H/SH. Dále jsou stručně popsány modely přenosových kanálů, které se používají pro modelování přenosu signálu. Stručný popis vytvořených aplikací, i s vývojovým diagramem, které jsou vhodné pro simulaci a analýzu přenosu v DVB-H/SH, jsou popsány v třetí části práce. Čtvrtá a nejdelší část této disertační práce se zabývá vyhodnocením získaných výsledků ze simulací a měření.This dissertation thesis deals with the analysis, simulation and measurement of the signal processing and transmission in DVB-H and DVB-SH standards. These standards are based on the assumption that signal reception is characterized by the transmission channels with echoes. These, so called fading channels, are mainly characterized by the path delays and path losses. Depending on the other, additional features (speed of the receiver, Doppler spectrum, etc.), it can be possible divided these channels onto three main groups: mobile, portable and fixed. Of course, signal transmission in different transmission channel models are affected differently. Therefore, it is needed found the optimal system parameters in both, DVB-H and DVB-SH standards, for the quality reception of the broadcasted mobile TV services, which is the main goal of this thesis. For this purpose, two appropriate applications (one for DVB-H and one for DVB-SH) with GUI were created in MATLAB, which enable simulated and analyzed the signal distortions in mobile, portable and fixed transmission scenarios. Moreover, these applications also contain a second application with GUI for the easy set and modification of the parameters of the used channel models. Therefore, it is possible to evaluate the effect of parameters of whole system and channel models on the achieved error rate (BER and MER) and quality of the transmission. In all mentioned transmission scenarios, the signal distortions (depending on the Carrier-to-Noise ratio) were obtained, evaluated and discussed in this dissertation thesis. Furthermore, in case of DVB-H, all obtained results from the simulations, were verified by the measuring. Differences between the obtained results (simulation and measuring) are also discussed. This dissertation thesis can be divided into four main parts. The first part of this dissertation thesis, after the short introduction, deals with present state-of-the-art and literature survey in mobile broadcast DVB-H/SH standards. At the end of this part are clearly outlined the main aims of this dissertation thesis. Second part is focused on the brief description of the functional block diagram of transmitters in both, DVB-H/SH standards. Furthermore, there are briefly described the transmission fading channel models, which are commonly used for the modeling of the signal transmission. The brief description of program applications with flowcharts, appropriate for the simulation of the transmission in the DVB-H/SH standards, are presented and described in the third part of this thesis. Finally, the fourth and longest part of this thesis is focused on the evaluation and comparison of obtained results from the simulations and measurements.

DVB-NGH: the Next Generation of Digital Broadcast Services to Handheld Devices

This paper reviews the main technical solutions adopted by the next-generation mobile broadcasting standard DVB-NGH, the handheld evolution of the second-generation digital terrestrial TV standard DVB-T2. The main new technical elements introduced with respect to DVB-T2 are: layered video coding with multiple physical layer pipes, time-frequency slicing, full support of an IP transport layer with a dedicated protocol stack, header compression mechanisms for both IP and MPEG-2 TS packets, new low-density parity check coding rates for the data path (down to 1/5), nonuniform constellations for 64 Quadrature Amplitude Modulation (QAM) and 256QAM, 4-D rotated constellations for Quadrature Phase Shift Keying (QPSK), improved time interleaving in terms of zapping time, end-to-end latency and memory consumption, improved physical layer signaling in terms of robustness, capacity and overhead, a novel distributed multiple input single output transmit diversity scheme for single-frequency networks (SFNs), and efficient provisioning of local content in SFNs. All these technological solutions, together with the high performance of DVB-T2, make DVB-NGH a real next-generation mobile multimedia broadcasting technology. In fact, DVB-NGH can be regarded the first third-generation broadcasting system because it allows for the possibility of using multiple input multiple output antenna schemes to overcome the Shannon limit of single antenna wireless communications. Furthermore, DVB-NGH also allows the deployment of an optional satellite component forming a hybrid terrestrial-satellite network topology to improve the coverage in rural areas where the installation of terrestrial networks could be uneconomical.Gómez Barquero, D.; Douillard, C.; Moss, P.; Mignone, V. (2014). DVB-NGH: the Next Generation of Digital Broadcast Services to Handheld Devices. IEEE Transactions on Broadcasting. 60(2):246-257. doi:10.1109/TBC.2014.2313073S24625760

Prediction of performance of the DVB-SH system relying on mutual information

DVB-SH (Digital Video Broadcasting-Satellite Handled) is a broadcasting standard dedicated to hybrid broadcasting systems combining a satellite and a terrestrial part. On the satellite part, dedicated interleaving and time slicing mechanisms are proposed to mitigate the effects of Land Mobile Satellite (LMS) channel, based on a convolutional interleaver. Depending on the parameters of this interleaver, this mechanism enables to split in time a codeword on duration from 100 ms to about 30s. This mechanism signi?cantly improves the error recovery performance of the code but in literature, exact evaluation at system level of this improvement is missing. The objective of this paper is to propose a prediction method compatible with fast simulations, to quantitatively evaluate the system performance in terms of Packet Error Rate (PER). The main dif?culty is to evaluate the decoding probability of a codeword submitted to several levels of attenuation. The method we propose consists in using as metric the Mutual Information (MI) between coded bit at the emitter side and the received symbol. It is shown that, by averaging the MI over the codeword and by using the decoding performance function g such that PER=g(MI)determined on the Gaussian channel, we can signi?cantly improve the precision of the prediction compared to the two other methods based on SNR and Bit Error Rate (BER). We evaluated these methods on three arti?cial channels where each codeword is transmitted with three or four different levels of attenuations. The prediction error of the SNR-based (resp. the input BER-based) method varies from 0.5 to 1.7 dB (resp. from 0.7 to 1.2 dB) instead of the MI-based method achieves a precision in the order of 0.1 dB in the three cases. We then evaluate this method on real LMS channels with various DVB-SH interleavers and show that the instantaneous PER can also be predicted with high accuracy

Evaluation of cross-layer reliability mechanisms for satellite digital multimedia broadcast

This paper presents a study of some reliability mechanisms which may be put at work in the context of Satellite Digital Multimedia Broadcasting (SDMB) to mobile devices such as handheld phones. These mechanisms include error correcting codes, interleaving at the physical layer, erasure codes at intermediate layers and error concealment on the video decoder. The evaluation is made on a realistic satellite channel and takes into account practical constraints such as the maximum zapping time and the user mobility at several speeds. The evaluation is done by simulating different scenarii with complete protocol stacks. The simulations indicate that, under the assumptions taken here, the scenario using highly compressed video protected by erasure codes at intermediate layers seems to be the best solution on this kind of channel

Comparative Analysis of Conventional and ICI-Self-Cancellation Digital Video Broadcasting Transceivers

Digital video broadcasting–terrestrial (DVB-T) is one of the important technologies in the communication area because of its capability of high data-rate multimedia transmission. Orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) has been the backbone technique in the current DVB-T systems adopted by Europe and Japan. However, since the OFDM system is very sensitive to the frequency synchronization and phase errors, which will induce the intercarrier interference (ICI), the ongoing research has been dedicated to this ICI problem in the presence of the Doppler frequency drift and the fading channels. A means to deal with the ICI problem is called the ICI self-cancellation or polynomial cancellation coding scheme. In this thesis, we establish the complete simulation environment for the physical layer of the DVB-T system and then evaluate the effectiveness of the ICI self-cancellation coding scheme compared with the existing convolutional coding scheme for different fading channels and different Doppler frequencies. According to our simulation results, we conclude that the ICI self-cancellation scheme significantly outperforms the convolutional coding scheme which is adopted by the existing DVB-T standard in the AWGN and the frequency non-selective fading channels, but both schemes have the similar performance in the frequency selective fading channels