OFDM-based turbo-coded hierarchical and non-hierarchical terrestrial mobile digital video broadcasting

The feasibility of terrestrial digital video broadcast (DVB) to mobile receivers is studied and turbo coded performance enhancements are proposed. Initially, the MPEG-2 codec is subjected to a rigorous bit error sensitivity investigation, in order to assist in designing various error protection schemes for wireless DVB transmission. The turbo codec is shown to provide signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) performance advantages in excess of 5-6 dB over conventional convolutional coding both in terms of bit error rate and video quality. Our experiments suggested that-despite our expectations-multi-class data partitioning did not result in error resilience improvements, since a high proportion of relatively sensitive video bits had to be relegated to the lower integrity subchannel, when invoking a powerful low-rate channel codec in the high-integrity protection class. Nonetheless, DVB transmission to mobile receivers is feasible, when using turbo-coded OFDM transceivers at realistic power-budget requirements under the investigated highly dispersive fading channel conditions. It is interesting to note furthermore that the 5-6 dB SNR improvement due to turbo coding allows us to invoke for example the double-throughput 16-level quadrature amplitude modulation (16-QAM) mode instead of the standard convolutional-coded 4-QAM mode. This facilitates doubling the bit rate and hence improving the video quality.