DVB-NGH: the next generation of digital broadcast services to handheld devices
Résumé
This paper reviews the main technical solutions adopted by the next generation mobile broadcasting standard DVB-NGH, the handheld evolution of the second generation digital terrestrial TV standard DVB-T2. The main technical elements introduced with respect to DVB-T2 are: layered video coding with multiple physical layer pipes, time-frequency slicing, full support of an IP transport layer with a dedicated protocol stack, header compression mechanisms for both IP and MPEG-2 TS packets, new LDPC coding rates for the data path (down to 1/5), non-uniform constellations for 64QAM and 256QAM, four-dimensional rotated constellations for QPSK, improved time interleaving in terms of zapping time, end-to-end latency and memory consumption, improved physical layer signaling in terms of robustness, capacity and overhead, a novel distributed MISO transmit diversity scheme for SFNs, and efficient provisioning of local content in SFNs. All these technological solutions, together with the high performance of DVB-T2, make DVB-NGH a real next-generation mobile multimedia broadcasting technology. In fact, DVB-NGH can be regarded the first third-generation broadcasting system because it allows for the possibility of using multiple input multiple output MIMO antenna schemes to overcome the Shannon limit of single antenna wireless communications. Furthermore, DVB-NGH also allows the deployment of an optional satellite component forming a hybrid terrestrial-satellite network topology to improve the coverage in rural areas where the installation of terrestrial networks could be uneconomical.