An inter-burst UEP-scheme for DVB-H using redundant transmission

Abstract

To address the challenges of mobile TV, the DVB project has defined a new broadcasting standard for handheld devices, known as DVB-H. The new link layer of DVB-H includes Reed Solomon forward error correction (RS-FEC), which provides additional robustness and flexibility in system design. RS-FEC is primarily designed as an equal error protection (EEP) scheme. However, it can be extended in a standard compatible way to also implement unequal error protection (UEP) schemes. In this paper we propose an UEP scheme that uses redundant transmission (RT) to spread important data over several DVB-H time slices. Basically, the base layer data is repeated in d consecutive time slices thus giving a coderate of 1/d. The time diversity gained through this inter-burst RT scheme is shown to be more effective than other proposed UEP schemes based on RS-FEC. Furthermore, this approach can be implemented in a standard compatible way.