Application of MPEG-2 Systems to Terrestrial ISDB (ISDB-T)

NHK has developed the band segmented transmission orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (BST-OFDM) scheme for the transmission system of Integrated Services Digital Broadcasting-Terrestrial (ISDB-T). This scheme provides the great advantages of hierarchical transmission and partial reception. To provide commonality with other systems, the transport signal of ISDB-T adopts the MPEG-2 transport stream (TS). However, TS has been designed for neither hierarchical transmission nor partial reception. Thus, to fulfil the requirements of ISDB-T, the TS has been adapted to provide effective hierarchical transmissions and partial reception. This paper describes the TS generation methods used by the remultiplexer for minimizing receiver processing load. Briefly, they are: 1) a method enabling hierarchical transmission and partial reception of a single TS; 2) a method relating a TS packet to a segment of the OFDM signal; 3) a method for interfacing the remultiplexer with a modulator at a single constant clock; 4) a method for reconstructing a serial TS at receivers from hierarchical transmission signals allotted to layers in parallel by an OFDM multicarrier; and 5) a method for correctly recovering the program clock reference (PCR) at a "partial reception" receiver, even if the TS rate of the receiver is different from that of the transmission side.