On Associating SVC and DVB-T2 for Mobile Television Broadcast

DVB-T2 is offering a new way for broadcasting value-added services, like HDTV and 3D TV, to either fix or mobile end users. Thanks to the advances made in digital signal processing, and specifically in channel coding, DVB-T2 brings a new flexibility in services' broadcasting with an increased transfer capacity of 50%, in contrast with the first generation of the DVB-T standard. On the other hand, SVC video coding is an emerging technique that uses scalability to encode video content in a hierarchical video streams (i.e. layers). Indeed, the SVC supports three types of video scalability: spatial, temporal and quality; which allow to handle users' heterogeneity in term of capacity and bandwidth. In this paper, we first propose to support SVC over DVB-T2 networks, by associating the layering architecture of both technology, in order to tackle users' mobility. This association allows mobile receivers with good physical channel to decode all the SVC layers and benefit from high video quality. Meanwhile, users with worst channel condition can at least decode the base layer and benefit from acceptable video quality. Secondly, we introduce a novel QoE-based adaptive mechanism for SVC layers decoding. The proposed approach selects dynamically the number of layers to decode, at the receiver side, so as to maximize the users' perceived quality. Simulation results show clearly the enhancement achieved by the proposed solution in term of user Quality of Experience (QoE).