Technical Solutions for Local Service Insertion in DVB-NGH Single Frequency Networks

Abstract

Current digital terrestrial television networks make use of either single frequency networks (SFN) or multifrequency networks (MFN). These network topologies are not ideally suited for delivery of both global and local services in an efficient way. MFNs enable the efficient transmission of local services but need a significant amount of frequency spectrum. The basic principle of SFNs is that all transmitters radiate the same signal synchronized in time and frequency, therefore are especially suitable for global services due to mutual support of the signal by multiple transmitters. Without violating the SFN principle, local services meant to address sub-regions of an SFN must therefore be transmitted throughout the whole network, causing inefficient distribution of local services. This paper describes the complementary techniques adopted by the next generation mobile broadcasting standard digital video broadcasting - next generation handheld for providing global and local contents in SFN topologies: hierarchical modulation (H-LSI) and orthogonal local services insertion (O-LSI) techniques. H-LSI uses hierarchical modulation to transmit local services on top of the global services in areas close to the transmitters, by transmitting the local services in the low priority stream and the global services in the high priority stream. The O-LSI scheme specifies groups of OFDM subcarriers in specific OFDM symbols for the exclusive use of particular transmitters to transmit local services. For both techniques, the transmission of local content through the whole SFN network can be scheduled in a way that different local areas do not interfere with each other. In addition to the description of both H-LSI and O-LSI schemes, the applicability of these approaches in terms of network topologies, implementation issues, and performance evaluation are analyzed.