A Novel Physical Layer Split FEC Scheme for Long Time Interleaving with Fast Zapping Support

This paper describes a novel forward error correction (FEC) and time interleaving scheme, known as BB-iFEC (Base Band inter-burst FEC), aimed to provide long time interleaving with fast zapping support. BB-iFEC is a split FEC scheme with an outer FEC and an outer time interleaver concatenated to the inner FEC and inner time interleaver. It is based on the link layer FEC scheme of the hybrid satellite-terrestrial mobile broadcasting standard DVB-SH (Satellite to Handhelds), known as MPE-iFEC (Multi Protocol Encapsulation inter-burst FEC), but moved down to the physical layer. This allows full transparency towards upper layers, as well as reduced signaling overhead and packet fragmentation. However, the major novelty is that it allows re-using the soft information at the output of the inner FEC decoder (i.e., the log-likelihood ratios, LLRs). Compared to hard decoding, this improves the performance at the expense of higher memory requirements at the receivers. Nevertheless, BB-iFEC allows to efficiently perform either soft or hard decoding, being thus a scalable solution. Another important advantage is that it can be introduced in future evolutions of existing systems, because it allows allows co-existence of terminals with and without long time interleaving support. The paper describes the main features of BB-iFEC and its implementation at the transmitter and receiver side. The paper also presents illustrative results for future evolutions of the digital terrestrial TV standard DVB-T2 (Second Generation Terrestrial), such as the next generation mobile broadcasting technology DVB-NGH (Next Generation Handheld).Gómez Barquero, D.; Gómez Molina, PF.; Gozálvez Serrano, D.; Sayadi, B.; Roullet, L. (2012). A Novel Physical Layer Split FEC Scheme for Long Time Interleaving with Fast Zapping Support. IEEE Transactions on Broadcasting. 58(2):269-276. doi:10.1109/TBC.2012.2185574S26927658

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

Combined Time, Frecuency and Space Diversity in Multimedia Mobile Broadcasting Systems

El uso combinado de diversidad en el dominio temporal, frecuencial y espacial constituye una valiosa herramienta para mejorar la recepción de servicios de difusión móviles. Gracias a la mejora conseguida por las técnicas de diversidad es posible extender la cobertura de los servicios móviles además de reducir la infraestructura de red. La presente tesis investiga el uso de técnicas de diversidad para la provisión de servicios móviles en la familia europea de sistemas de difusión terrestres estandarizada por el prpoyecto DVB (Digital Video Broadcasting). Esto incluye la primera y segunda generación de sistemas DVB-T (Terrestrial), DVB-NGH (Handheld), y DVB-T2 (Terrestrial 2nd generation), así como el sistema de siguiente generación DVB-NGH. No obstante, el estudio llevado a cabo en la tesis es genérico y puede aplicarse a futuras evoluciones de estándares como el japonés ISDB-T o el americano ATSC. Las investigaciones realizadas dentro del contexto de DVB-T, DVB-H y DVBT2 tienen como objetivo la transmisión simultánea de servicios fijos y móviles en redes terrestres. Esta Convergencia puede facilitar la introducción de servicios móviles de TB debido a la reutilización de espectro, contenido e infraestructura. De acuerdo a los resultados, la incorporación de entrelazado temporal en la capa física para diversidad temporal, y de single-input multiple-output (SIMO) para diversidad espacial, son esenciales para el rendimiento de sistemas móviles de difusión. A pesar de que las técnicas upper later FEC (UL-FEC) pueden propocionar diversidad temporal en sistemas de primera generación como DVB-T y DVB-H, requieren la transmisión de paridad adicional y no son útiles para la recepción estática. El análisis en t�ñerminos de link budjget revela que las técnicas de diversidad noson suficientes para facilitar la provision de servicios móviles en redes DVB-T y DVB-T2 planificadas para recepción fija. Sin embargo, el uso de diversidad en redes planificadas para recepción portableGozálvez Serrano, D. (2012). Combined Time, Frecuency and Space Diversity in Multimedia Mobile Broadcasting Systems [Tesis doctoral no publicada]. Universitat Politècnica de València. https://doi.org/10.4995/Thesis/10251/16273Palanci

Time Diversity in Mobile DVB-T2 Systems

DVB-T2 implements a very flexible time interleaving that allows multiple tradeoffs in terms of time diversity, latency and power saving. In this paper, we study in detail these tradeoffs in the context of mobile reception. Together with time diversity, we also investigate the impact of reduced time de-interleaving memory and Alamouti-based MISO in the mobile reception of DVB-T2 services. In addition, we propose the utilization of upper layer FEC protection in order to overcome the limitations of the DVB-T2 physical layer for the provision of long time interleaving, and enable fast zapping. The performance is evaluated by means of simulations in mobile channels that include the presence of fast fading and shadowing in the received signal. © 2010 IEEE.Manuscript received October 13, 2010; revised April 22, 2011; accepted May 11, 2011. Date of publication July 25, 2011; date of current version August 24, 2011. This work was supported in part by the Spanish Ministry of Industry, Tourism, and Commerce under the Celtic project Enabling Next-Generation Networks for Broadcast Services ENGINES (TSI-020400-2010-108). The work of D. Gozalvez was supported by the FPU Grant AP2008-03293 of the Spanish Ministry of Education.Gozálvez Serrano, D.; Gómez Barquero, D.; Vargas, D.; Cardona Marcet, N. (2011). Time Diversity in Mobile DVB-T2 Systems. IEEE Transactions on Broadcasting. 57(3):617-628. doi:10.1109/TBC.2011.2161189S61762857

Rotated constellations for improved time and frequency diversity in DVB-NGH

“© 2013 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, in any current or future media, including reprinting/republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works, for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted component of this work in other works.”In this paper, we investigate the potential gains that can be obtained with rotated constellations in DVB-NGH, the next-generation mobile broadcasting standard. Rotated constellations exploit the concept of signal-space diversity (SSD) to increase the diversity order of bit-interleaved coded modulation (BICM) at the expense of higher demodulation complexity without the need of additional transmission power or bandwidth. Two-dimensional rotated constellations (2DRC) were originally included in DVB-T2 (terrestrial second generation) to improve the reception robustness in fading channels. DVB-NGH inherits the same 2DRC from DVB-T2 and includes four-dimensional rotated constellations (4DRC) for certain configurations. Moreover, the standard has adopted a new component interleaver optimized for the utilization of rotated constellations with long time interleaving (TI) and time-frequency slicing (TFS). In this context, the additional robustness of rotated constellations is very interesting to counter the presence of signal outages in the time and frequency domains. To investigate the potential gains of 2DRC and 4DRC, we employ an information-theoretic approach based on mutual information, as well as physical layer simulations in DVB-NGH systems. The results reveal that rotated constellations are important to increase the diversity gains of long TI and TFS, and also to reduce the zapping time perceived by the users.Gozálvez Serrano, D.; Gimenez Gandia, JJ.; Gómez Barquero, D.; Cardona Marcet, N. (2013). Rotated constellations for improved time and frequency diversity in DVB-NGH. IEEE Transactions on Broadcasting. 59(2):298-305. doi:10.1109/TBC.2013.225286229830559

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

Transmission of Mobile Multimedia Services in DVB-SH Networks

[ES] La presente Tesina estudia la transmisión de contenidos y servicios multimedia a través de redes de difusión basadas en el sistema DVB-SH (Digital Video Broadcasting ¿ Satellite Services to Handheld Devices), el cual permitirá conseguir una cobertura nacional en toda Europa de servicios de TV móvil y cuya puesta en funcionamiento está prevista para el 2008. DVB-SH es una evolución tecnológica del estándar europeo de TDT móvil DVB-H (Digital Video Broadcasting - Handhelds). Sus principales características son una arquitectura híbrida terrestre-satelital y la transmisión en banda S en torno a los 2 GHz. la cual está disponible en Europa para este tipo de servicios. Además, debido a las peculiaridades de la recepción vía satélite, DVB-SH incorpora nuevos mecanismos de protección entre los que destacan un entrelazador de larga duración de nivel físico y un nuevo esquema de codificación de nivel de enlace. Debido a que en la actualidad el sistema DVB-SH todavía se encuentra en una fase muy temprana de validación, el trabajo realizado en esta tesina está encaminado a evaluar los nuevos mecanismos de nivel de enlace DVB-SH a partir de trazas de errores DVB-H. Se analizará la calidad de usuario para diferentes mecanismos de protección y finalmente se identificarán aquellos esquemas y configuraciones más adecuados para las situaciones de recepción más importantes[EN] This Master's thesis studies the transmission of multimedia digital contents in broadcasting networks based in the DVB-SH (Digital Video Broadcasting ¿ Satellite Services to Handheld Devices) standard. This standard will make possible a network capable of providing mobile TV services in all Europe, which is due at 2008. DVB-SH is the technological evolution of the European mobile DTT standard DVB-H (Digital Video Broadcasting - Handhelds). Its main characteristics are a hybrid terrestrial ¿ satellite architecture and the transmission at 2 GHz in the S-band, which is at disposal in Europe for this kind of services. Because of the peculiarities of satellite reception, DVB-SH incorporates new protection mechanisms. Among these mechanisms, a long duration interleaver and a new link layer codification scheme stand out. However, DVB-SH technology is still in an early phase of validation. Because of this, the work fulfilled in this Master's thesis is aimed at evaluating these codification schemes by means of DVB-H error traces. The user experience quality will be analyzed for different protection mechanisms and the schemes and configurations with better performance will be highlighted.Gozálvez Serrano, D. (2007). Transmission of Mobile Multimedia Services in DVB-SH Networks. http://hdl.handle.net/10251/12620Archivo delegad

COST EFFICIENT PROVISIONING OF MASS MOBILE MULTIMEDIA SERVICES IN HYBRID CELLULAR AND BROADCASTING SYSTEMS

Uno de los retos a los que se enfrenta la industria de las comunicaciones móviles e inalámbricas es proporcionar servicios multimedia masivos a bajo coste, haciéndolos asequibles para los usuarios y rentables a los operadores. El servicio más representativo es el de TV móvil, el cual se espera que sea una aplicación clave en las futuras redes móviles. Actualmente las redes celulares no pueden soportar un consumo a gran escala de este tipo de servicios, y las nuevas redes de radiodifusión móvil son muy costosas de desplegar debido a la gran inversión en infraestructura de red necesaria para proporcionar niveles aceptables de cobertura. Esta tesis doctoral aborda el problema de la provisión eficiente de servicios multimedia masivos a dispositivos móviles y portables utilizando la infraestructura de radiodifusión y celular existente. La tesis contempla las tecnologías comerciales de última generación para la radiodifusión móvil (DVB-H) y para las redes celulares (redes 3G+ con HSDPA y MBMS), aunque se centra principalmente en DVB-H. El principal paradigma propuesto para proporcionar servicios multimedia masivos a bajo coste es evitar el despliegue de una red DVB-H con alta capacidad y cobertura desde el inicio. En su lugar se propone realizar un despliegue progresivo de la infraestructura DVB-H siguiendo la demanda de los usuarios. Bajo este contexto, la red celular es fundamental para evitar sobre-dimensionar la red DVB-H en capacidad y también en áreas con una baja densidad de usuarios hasta que el despliegue de un transmisor o un repetidor DVB-H sea necesario. Como principal solución tecnológica la tesis propone realizar una codificación multi-burst en DVB-H utilizando códigos Raptor. El objetivo es explotar la diversidad temporal del canal móvil para aumentar la robustez de la señal y, por tanto, el nivel de cobertura, a costa de incrementar la latencia de la red.Gómez Barquero, D. (2009). COST EFFICIENT PROVISIONING OF MASS MOBILE MULTIMEDIA SERVICES IN HYBRID CELLULAR AND BROADCASTING SYSTEMS [Tesis doctoral no publicada]. Universitat Politècnica de València. https://doi.org/10.4995/Thesis/10251/6881Palanci

Combined time, frequency and space diversity in DVB-NGH

“© 2013 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, in any current or future media, including reprinting/republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works, for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted component of this work in other works.”In this paper, we investigate the combined use of time, frequency, and space diversity in DVB-NGH, the next generation mobile broadcasting standard. Compared to current standards like DVB-H or DVB-SH, the largest improvement in next generation systems is expected to be achieved by means of better diversity in the time, frequency, and space domains. In this sense, DVB-NGH is the first broadcasting system to exploit the use of diversity in the three domains by incorporating at the physical layer long time interleaving (TI), time-frequency slicing (TFS), and multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO). This paper investigates the gains of using time, frequency, and space diversity in DVB-NGH, as well as the mutual influence between the different types of diversity. To this purpose, we employ an information-theoretic approach based on the outage capacity of the channel in addition to physical layer simulations.Gozálvez Serrano, D.; Gómez Barquero, D.; Vargas Paredero, DE.; Cardona Marcet, N. (2013). Combined time, frequency and space diversity in DVB-NGH. IEEE Transactions on Broadcasting. 59(4):674-684. doi:10.1109/TBC.2013.2281665S67468459

On the Provisioning of Mobile Digital Terrestrial TV Services to Vehicles with DVB-T

(c) 2012 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other users, including reprinting/ republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted components of this work in other works[EN] Most of the DVB-T (Digital Video Broadcasting -Terrestrial) networks deployments worldwide have been designed for fixed rooftop antennas and high transmission capacity, not providing good coverage level for vehicular mobile reception. This letter analyzes how to combine different technical solutions, so far studied individually, in order to increase the robustness of the transmission for vehicular reception to provide in-band mobile services. In particular, we consider: receive antenna diversity, hierarchical modulation, and Application Layer Forward Error Correction (AL-FEC). Performance evaluation results have been obtained by means of simulations, laboratory tests, and field measurements in the commercial DVB-T network of the city of Valencia (Spain). The paper shows that the combined usage of these solutions can compensate the impairments caused by the mobility of the receivers, such as signal fast fading, Doppler shift, the poor coverage at ground level and the utilization of lower gain antennas; being possible to provide mobile DVB-T services to vehicles in networks dimensioned for fixed rooftop reception.This work was supported in part by the Spanish Ministry of Industry, Tourism and Commerce under the project AV-MOV (TSI-020301-2009-11).López Sánchez, J.; Gomez-Barquero, D.; Gozálvez Serrano, D.; Cardona Marcet, N. (2012). On the Provisioning of Mobile Digital Terrestrial TV Services to Vehicles with DVB-T. IEEE Transactions on Broadcasting. 58(4):642-647. https://doi.org/10.1109/TBC.2012.2202034S64264758