Restoration of IP-datagrams in the DVB-H link-layer for TV on mobile

The DVB-H standard, as approved by ETSI, enables power efficient and robust reception of digital broadcasted television on mobile phones. This so called "TV on mobile" is backwards compatible with DVB-T and uses the Internet protocol for carrying highly compressed audio/visual (A/V) information. Transmission errors lead to corrupt IP-datagrams, which to a certain extent can be corrected by the link-layer forward error correction (FEC). Uncorrected IP-datagrams lead to a degradation of the A/V quality. Therefore the efficiency of IP-datagram restoration is a measure for the quality of service (QoS). A cyclic redundancy check (CRC) can be used as a source of erasure information for informing the link-layer FEC decoder about the integrity of IP-datagrams. In this paper it is shown that relying on information from the physical layer FEC decoder, one can also recover fragments of IP-datagrams and extract information about the condition of these fragments. Using this information leads to smaller erased parts and therefore to a more efficient use of the link-layer FEC. As a result the number of restored IP datagrams increases, leading to a better QoS.