LDPC FEC Code Extension for Unequal Error Protection in DVB-T2 System: Design and Evaluation

Abstract

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.

Performance modeling of FEC‐based unequal error protection for H.264/AVC video streaming over burst‐loss channels

“…In Equation (16), this means that less than h j packets are lost in the j-th frame, and this frame is decodable by the FEC decoder. In Equation (16), this means that less than h j packets are lost in the j-th frame, and this frame is decodable by the FEC decoder.…”

“…where num(x) denotes the number of lost packets in binary pattern x. In Equation (16), this means that less than h j packets are lost in the j-th frame, and this frame is decodable by the FEC decoder.…”

“…The first UEP codes were proposed by Masnick and Wolf [8]. UEP with the low-density parity-check (LDPC) codes are also proposed for H.264/AVC scalable video coding [15,16]. The main goal of UEP technique is to achieve the maximum expected quality of video streaming.…”

“…UEP with Reed-Solomon (RS) codes has been widely adopted in [12][13][14]. UEP with the low-density parity-check (LDPC) codes are also proposed for H.264/AVC scalable video coding [15,16]. Since the use of a fixed code rate would lead to the bandwidth waste under the situation that the channel loss is overestimated, the rate-less codes such as Fountain codes and Raptor codes are proposed and their applications with UEP for video streaming can be found in [17,18].…”