Mobile TV with SVC and hierarchical modulation for DVB-H broadcast services

This work shows exemplary applications for combining the hierarchical modulation of DVB-H with the recently approved scalable extension of H.264/AVC (SVC). Although hierarchical modulation is an essential part of the DVB-H standard, it did receive little attention up to now. Compared to a standard modulation scheme, using hierarchical modulation can show a significant gain either in terms of bit-rate or required transmission power. Since with hierarchical modulation the channel capacity is spread over two independent multiplexes, a typical single layer video codec like H.264/AVC cannot fully utilize the given advantages. The combination with Scalable Video Coding (SVC) allows for both introducing new features in a backward compatible way and optimally utilizing the total channel capacity. Three exemplary applications for Mobile TV show, that the combination of the hierarchical modulation and SVC can show a significant benefit compared to current systems.