Evaluation of Cross-Layer Reliability Mechanisms for Satellite Digital Multimedia Broadcast

This paper presents a study of some reliability mechanisms which may be put at work in the context of Satellite Digital Multimedia Broadcasting (SDMB) to mobile devices such as handheld phones. These mechanisms include error correcting codes, interleaving at the physical layer, erasure codes at intermediate layers and error concealment on the video decoder. The evaluation is made on a realistic satellite channel and takes into account practical constraints such as the maximum zapping time and the user mobility at several speeds. The evaluation is done by simulating different scenarios with complete protocol stacks. The simulations indicate that, under the assumptions taken here, the scenario using highly compressed video protected by erasure codes at intermediate layers seems to be the best solution on this kind of channel.