Mobile reception of DVB-T services by means of AL-FEC protection

This paper proposes and investigates the use of Application Layer Forward Error Correction (AL-FEC) based on Raptor codes for digital television DVB-T (Digital Video Broadcasting - Terrestrial) services. By means of AL-FEC it is possible to increase the robustness of traditional DVB-T transmissions for the provision of mobile TV. The AL-FEC protection is introduced in a backwards compatible way with the legacy DVB-T standard and does not alter the originally transmitted multimedia data. In order to evaluate the performance of AL-FEC in mobile channel environments, we employ laboratory measurements along with dynamic shadowing simulations. The paper presents direct comparisons with the link layer protection mechanism of DVB-H - referred to as MPE-FEC (Multi Protocol Encapsulation - Forward Error Correction) - and illustrates the link margin gains that can be achieved in mobile DVB-T reception by means of AL-FEC.