Coverage estimation for multiburst FEC mobile TV services in DVB-H systems

Although Digital Video Broadcast-Handheld (DVB-H) is currently considered to be a mature technology, new multiburst forward error-correction (FEC) schemes such as multiprotocol encapsulation-interburst FEC (MPE-iFEC) and application-layer FEC (AL-FEC) can be applied to mobile TV streaming services to increase the robustness of the transmission. Compared with the conventional intraburst approach MPE-FEC, multiburst encoding provides protection across several bursts rather than within a single burst because it is possible to recover from completely erroneous bursts. The robustness of the transmission can be enhanced, keeping the capacity devoted for error repair (code rate or FEC overhead) and thus increasing the number of interleaved bursts. This paper describes a methodology for estimating the coverage for multiburst FEC DVB-H mobile TV streaming services in realistic scenarios based on dynamic system-level simulations. Furthermore, it presents illustrative performance-evaluation results with field measurements, and it presents simulation results quantifying the reduction in the fading margin required to cope with fast fading and shadowing that can be achieved with multiburst FEC, compared with MPE-FEC.