Redundancy on Demand—Extending the Coverage Area of Terrestrial Broadcast via Broadband Networks

Nowadays more and more TV terminal devices for digital terrestrial broadcast are also equipped with broadband network interfaces. In view of this fact, we developed a novel redundancy on demand (RoD) system to improve the reception of terrestrial broadcast signals with the help of additional redundancy data transmitted via broadband networks. We propose various forms of redundancy, which can be provided on request by the receiving terminal in case of reception errors. RoD does not require any changes of the current broadcast network structure and is compatible with conventional receivers. Simulation results show that a small portion of additional redundancy data provided by the broadband network leads to significant performance improvements of the reception, making high data rate broadcasting feasible in a realistic environment. RoD introduces a new degree of freedom for network planning helping to reduce transmission cost and network energy consumption.