Error repair for broadcast transmissions in DVB-H systems

People travelling in public transportation vehicles are foreseen to be a relevant use case of future Digital Video Broadcast—Handhelds (DVB-H) systems. However, it is also one of the critical user cases, since, besides the vehicle penetration loss, the received signal quality is strongly affected by the high mobility of the users, which is accompanied by temporary shadowing and fast fading. On the other hand, mobility can be also beneficial thanks to the bursty character of DVB-H transmissions, as additional repair data can be sent in the time intervals between original service bursts in order to hide the coverage discontinuities from the users’ perception. In this way, users which miss the original transmission have more chances to receive the information correctly. By managing the amount of repair data the network operator can trade system capacity and network latency for improved vehicular user satisfaction in a DVB-H network with imperfect coverage of the service area (as perceived by the vehicular users). To illustrate the potential of this approach, we evaluate the mentioned trade-off in a DVB-H system dimensioned for pedestrian outdoor users, for both streaming and filecasting services. To enable an easy and efficient implementation of the repair mechanisms, we adopt application layer forward error correction (FEC), as it can provide a multi-burst protection of the transmission. Copyright # 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.