Experimental characterisation of the impact of IP-based distribution network QoS on the QoE of DVB-H mobile broadcast video services

DVB-H is an international broadcasting standard, which offers reliable high data reception to mobile handheld devices. Its main enhancements to conventional DVB-T systems include the addition of time-slicing and an extra stage of error correction called MPE-FEC at the link layer. Time-slicing means that each service will be sent in bursts while MPE-FEC increases the robustness of reception for mobile terminals. DVB-H is mostly used to offer real-time mobile video services, which have very stringent demands in terms of QoS. When deploying such a DVBH mobile television service, the broadcast operator has to feed all the DVB-H antennas through its primary distribution network. This is typically done by using a satellite uplink but in more dense arias existing fixed network infrastructure may be used. In this paper we present the effects of packet loss, introduced in an IP based distribution network, on the quality of experience (QoE), the quality of the mobile video service as perceived by the end user measured through PSNR, the most commonly used objective video quality metric. It is shown that, although MPE-FEC is introduced for better reception between antenna and receiver, that its use also has a major impact on the effects of packet loss that occurs in the distribution network. In order to reduce the impact of packet loss in the distribution link, additional error correction may be introduced in the distribution link. This paper also evaluates the benefit of such an additional error correction technique with respect to the QoE of the DVB-H service, with a given MPE-FEC rate.