A mixed satellite TV channel transmission scheme to enhance frequency bandwidth utilization

Abstract

SummaryIn the recent past, television (TV) industry has started to provide users with ultra high definition (ultra‐HD) and/or 3‐dimensional TV programs, which on the one hand, can bring users greatly enhanced viewing experience, while on the other hand, considerably increases the transmission bandwidth requirements and may lead to bandwidth shortage situations in many different types of TV systems. In particular, this bandwidth shortage poses a serious challenge in the current satellite TV broadcasting systems because of the strictly limited bandwidth available in C and Ku frequency bands. Aiming at mitigating the bandwidth shortage problem, this paper proposes an innovative mixed channel transmission scheme for the next generation satellite TV systems. The proposed scheme integrates the merits of using both broadcast and multicast methods, both Ku and Ka frequency bands, as well as both wide‐shaped and spot antenna beam types. According to the conducted comprehensive simulation experiments, this mixed scheme is able to effectively enhance the frequency bandwidth utilization with still providing users affordable quality of experience. Moreover, to cope with the impact brought by ever increasing number of provided TV channels, this paper enhances the proposed scheme by using multicast method to transmit those least popular global channels, which can efficiently reduce the quality of experience degradation up to 90% in Ku‐ and Ka‐band frequency resource restricted scenarios.