Design and realization of the hierarchical broadcast system based on GNU Radio

In traditional broadcast systems, the video services are broadcasted for all the users whose qualities are determined by the worst channel conditions. To achieve high performance gain for the users with good channel states, hierarchical modulation (HM) and scalable video coding (SVC) are proposed. Specifically, SVC provides base layer and enhancement layer videos so that the system can satisfy various requests of users, while HM improves the system efficiency by delivering both layers. In this paper, we realize the hierarchical broadcast system by the GNU Radio platform with the Universal Software Radio Peripheral (USRP). Then the simulation results, such as bit error rate (BER) and peak signal to noise ratio (PSNR) are presented to show that the hierarchical broadcast system can achieve better performance.