Practical tests with MMT and ROUTE/DASH on the transport layer of ATSC 3.0

Abstract

The development of new technologies allowed television systems to evolve over time. For the transport layer, the Movie Pictures Expert Group (MPEG) developed several standards to deliver multimedia content, including the MPEG-2 Transport Stream (TS), which has been widely explored for years. However, it was developed before the spread of the internet, which led to the interest in a new standard that could fulfill the needs from a connected world. One of these standards is the MPEG Multimedia Transport (MMT), which has inherited some features from the MPEG-2 TS, adapting them to be compatible with the Internet Protocol (IP). The broadband systems also needed a new standard compatible with Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP), resulting in the development of the MPEG-Dynamic Adaptive Streaming over HTTP (DASH). To deliver DASH on broadcast channels, it was combined with the Real-time Object delivery over Unidirectional Transport (ROUTE) protocol. The Advanced Television Systems Committee 3.0 (ATSC 3.0) adopted many technologies to attend the requirements for the next generation of television systems, including both MMT and ROUTE/DASH. This paper presents a historic background of these delivery methods, as well as a brief technical review, focusing on a practical setup to test the methods mentioned, analyzing the differences and similarities of their properties.