Mobile broadcast services have experienced a strong boost in recent years through the standardization of several mobile broadcast systems such as DVB-H, ATSC-M/H, DMB-T/H, and CMMB. However, steady need for higher quality services is projected to surpass the capabilities of the existing mobile broadcast systems. Consequently, work on new generations of mobile broadcast technology is starting under the umbrella of different industry consortia, such as DVB. In this paper, we address the question of how DVB-T2 transmission can be optimized for improved mobile broadcast reception. We investigate cross-layer optimization techniques with a focus on the transport of scalable video (SVC) streams over DVB-T2 Physical Layer Pipes (PLP). Throughout the paper, we propose different optimization options and verify their utility.

The Digital Video Broadcasting organisation has recently introduced the second generation of terrestrial broadcast transmission standards, DVB-T2. The newly introduced tools ensure significant gain in performance of DVB-T2 compared to the first generation variant of the standard. One of these tools is the new physical layer concatenated forward error correction code. The inner among the concatenated codes is the Low-Density Parity Check code. The paper proposes a method to extend this code so varying coding strength inside one physical layer pipe of DVB-T2 is enabled in a backward compatible way. As consequence, unequal error protection transmission scheme at a physical layer of DVB-T2 can be efficiently deployed. The paper provides a step-by-step description of the design procedure of the extension. Moreover, the modification to the processing chain and the framing structure of DVB-T2, that ensures backward compatibility to the legacy system, is provided. The proposed method is evaluated under AWGN channel and TU6 channel. Experiments performed on four different video sequences show significant improvements in quality of experience when the proposed extension is used to achieve UEP transmission.

Abstract-DVB-T2 has been recently standardized by the DVB organization.In this paper the deployment of H.264/SVC in DVB-T2 is discussed. We focus on the system configuration aspects which provide optimal use of DVB-T2 features from the H.264/SVC point of view. We also propose modifications to the error protection mechanisms that would consequently lead to an improvement of user experience. The data dependencies in H.264/SVC are exploited to protect the media data unevenly according to their priorities.

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In this paper, we propose a novel algorithm for constructing an Unequal Error Protection (UEP) FEC code targeted towards video streaming applications. A concatenation of a set of parallel outer block codes followed by a packet interleaver and an inner block code is presented. The algorithm calculates on the fly the optimal allocation of the code rates of the inner and outer codes. When applied to video streaming applications using H.264, the discussed UEP framework achieves gains of up to 5dB in video quality compared to equal error protection (EEP) FEC at the same code rate.