Design of Middleware for Interactive Data Services in the Terrestrial DMB

In this letter, we introduce a new middleware architecture and its generic application programming interface (API) (called the T‐DMB MATE API) for terrestrial digital multimedia broadcasting (T‐DMB). Middleware in T‐DMB enables inter‐operable applications to be downloaded from both broadcast and telecommunication networks in advance and to be executed in any type of T‐DMB receiver. The middleware we introduce here is especially designed to support a proposed method for application provisions applied to a concept of application module appropriate to the service environment of T‐DMB. We also verify the designed T‐DMB MATE API through the implementation of the middleware and its application in a PC‐based receiver.     

Minimal cost coverage planning for single frequency networks

OFDM based single frequency networks (SFNs) have been standardized for terrestrial broadcasting systems, for digital audio broadcasting (DAB) as well as for digital video broadcasting (DVB). Due to the multipath tolerance of the OFDM scheme, the receiver is able to combine signals coming from several transmitters, despite of the varying propagation delays, i.e., heavy artificial multipath propagation. In order to take full advantage of the diversity gain provided by the SFN architecture, proper network design is required. We focus on the cost efficient design of an SFN providing broadcasting services over a predefined service area with requirements both on the received signal quality and on the allowable interference level experienced by existing services in the same spectrum. We formulate the problem as a discrete optimization problem, where the network design parameters such as power, antenna heights and transmitter locations are the decision variables. The general stochastic optimisation algorithm simulated annealing has been adapted for solving the above problem. The novelty of our method is that cost factors and interference constraints are embedded in the optimisation procedure. Through numerical examples we demonstrate that significant reduction in network cost can be achieved by our approach     

Design of AT‐DMB Baseband Receiver SoC

This paper presents the design of an advanced terrestrial digital multimedia broadcasting (AT‐DMB) baseband receiver SoC. The AT‐DMB baseband is incorporated into a hierarchical modulation scheme consisting of high priority (HP) and low priority (LP) stream decoders. The advantages of the hierarchical modulation scheme are backward compatibility and an enhanced data rate. The structure of the HP stream is the same as that of the conventional T‐DMB system; therefore, a conventional T‐DMB service is possible by decoding multimedia data in an HP stream. An enhanced data rate can be achieved by using both HP and LP streams. In this paper, we also discuss a time deinterleaver that can deinterleave data for a time duration of 384 ms or 768 ms. The interleaving time duration is chosen using the LP symbol mapping scheme. Furthermore, instead of a Viterbi decoder, a turbo decoder is adopted as an inner error correction system to mitigate the performance degradation due to a smaller symbol distance in a hierarchically modulated LP symbol. The AT‐DMB baseband receiver SoC is fabricated using 0.13 µm technology and shows successful operation with a 50 mW power dissipation.     

On the outage probability in local/regional single frequency broadcasting networks

A receiver in an ODFM based broadcasting system allows all transmitters in a radio network to simultaneously broadcast the same information in the same frequency block. This procedure generates an artificial multipath environment at the receiver. Since the receiver is designed to overcome these problems, such a Single Frequency Network (SFN) provides good coverage and frequency economy in national applications. However, the efficiency in local SFN has been questioned. The network planning of local SFNs is a mixture of conventional frequency reuse planning and planning to avoid excessive propagation delays caused by the artificial delay spread. In this paper we propose some rules of thumb to be considered in the design of local SFNs. The coverage properties in SFNs are strongly dependent on the transmitter density which determines the degree of diversity of receiving signals from several transmitters. Results indicate that required coverage can be attained in local networks using three OFDM frequency blocks, provided that seven transmitters are used to cover each regional service area. The results also indicate that the duration of the guard interval between two consecutive OFDM signals has to be chosen with some care dependent on the size of the service area. Furthermore, we show that there exists an optimal antenna height for a given coverage area and guard interval.     

Space‐time ring‐TCM codes with CPM based on the decomposed model for transmission over Rayleigh fading channels

Space–time (ST) coding is a proved technique for achieving high data rates in 3G mobile systems that combines coding, modulation and multiple transmitters and receivers. A novel algorithm is proposed for ST ring trellis‐coded modulation (ST‐RTCM) systems with continuous‐phase modulation (CPM) when the channel coefficients are known to the receiver. This algorithm is based on the CPM decomposed model, which exploits the memory properties of this modulation method, resulting in a straightforward implementation of joint ST coding and CPM, which is particularly suitable for ring codes. This new scheme is used to investigate the performance of the delay diversity code with CPM over slow Rayleigh fading channels, in particular with MSK which is one of the most widely used modulation methods of continuous phase. Furthermore, a feedback version of delay diversity allowed by the decomposition is tested in 1REC and 1RC systems. This feedback configuration is seen to provide good results for low signal‐to‐noise ratios. Simulations results are also provided for multilevel ST‐RTCM codes that achieve a higher throughput than MSK‐coded systems. Additionally the serial concatenation of an outer Reed–Solomon code with an ST‐RTCM code is shown, this combination further reduces the error probability and achieves even more reliable communications. Copyright © 2005 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Demonstration of Bidirectional Services Using MPEG‐4 BIFS in Terrestrial DMB Systems

Digital broadcasting technology has developed focusing on multi‐channel/multi‐media, high‐definition quality, and mobility‐support. Recently, there has been a clear trend toward bidirectional service with the convergence between broadcasting and communication. The broadcasting viewer is no longer simply a passive receptor but has also become an information generator. Currently, the digital multimedia broadcasting (DMB) specifications are the major standard for portable digital broadcasting and have been establishing the overall guidelines for bidirectional service using the MPEG‐4 system. While detailed specifications for DMB systems are not well‐established for bidirectional service yet, they share the basic concepts underlying the European Eureka‐147 Digital Audio Broadcasting (DAB) system. This paper develops key scenarios for bidirectional service in DMB, describes the signal transaction of broadcasting and return channels, and demonstrates typical scenarios using binary format for scenes (BIFS) in the MPEG‐4 system.     

Multi‐channel Audio Service in a Terrestrial‐DMB System Using VSLI‐Based Spatial Audio Coding

Spatial audio coding (SAC) is an extremely high compact representation of encoded multi‐channel audio material. This paper suggests a multi‐channel audio service in the terrestrial digital multimedia broadcasting (T‐DMB) system using a novel SAC tool, which is called a virtual source location information (VSLI)‐based SAC tool. Intensive experiments are presented to evaluate the validity of the proposed VSLI‐based SAC tool, and prototypical systems are also presented to demonstrate the reliability of the proposed multi‐channel T‐DMB system in real applications.     

Obtaining diversity gain for DTV by using MIMO structure in SFN

In Digital TV Broadcasting, the Scheme of Single Frequency Network (SFN) has nontrivial advantages. By forming a SFN, a broadcasting system is able to serve an arbitrary large area with the same program within the same frequency block. At the mean time, the SFN structure provides the receiver with a potential of yielding the space diversity gain, while the power in every single transmitter is not increased. However, there are heavy artificial multipath propagation in the area covered by the SFN broadcasting. Traditionally, a transversal equalizer is used at the receiver to remove the SFN interference. The equalizer always cannot converge properly due to the over-long time delay and the over-large magnitude of the different paths from each transmitter of the SFN. To solve the problem, a new model based on the MIMO structure of the SFN is proposed in this paper, where the signal's space information is exploited. With the model in mind, a new receiving scheme is derived. By using a beamformer, signals with different incident angles are separated, so the problem caused by the over-long delay and the over-large magnitude is avoided. A bank of parallel sub-filters are used to remove the residual multipath spread. The space diversity gain is obtained at the output of a combiner.     

Per‐antenna power minimization in symbol‐level precoding for the multibeam satellite downlink

This paper addresses the problem of multiuser interference in the forward downlink channel of a multibeam satellite system. A symbol‐level precoding scheme is considered, to exploit the multiuser interference and transform it into useful power at the receiver side, through a joint utilization of the data information and the channel state information. In this context, a per‐antenna power minimization scheme is proposed, under quality‐of‐service constraints, for multilevel modulation schemes. The consideration of the power limitations individually for each transmitting radio frequency chain is a central aspect of this work, and it allows to deal with systems using separate per‐antenna amplifiers. Moreover, this feature is also particularly relevant for systems suffering nonlinear effects of the channel. This is the case of satellite systems, where the nonlinear amplifiers should be properly driven to reduce the detrimental saturation effect. In the proposed scheme, the transmitted signals are designed to reduce the power peaks, while guaranteeing some specific target signal‐to‐noise ratios at the receivers. Numerical results are presented to show the effectiveness of the proposed scheme, which is compared both with the state of the art in symbol‐level precoding and with the conventional minimum mean square error precoding approach.     

Efficient Generation of Scalable Transport Stream for High Quality Service in T‐DMB

We introduce an advanced terrestrial digital multimedia broadcasting (AT‐DMB) system that overcomes the limitation of data transmission rates of T‐DMB by doubling it with the same frequency bandwidth. In this letter, we propose an efficient algorithm which generates a scalable transport stream in AT‐DMB by multiplexing certain types of elementary streams encoded using scalable video coding and an MPEG‐surround audio coder for high‐quality multimedia services.     

An Efficient and Flexible Hybrid Conditional Access System for Advanced T‐DMB

This letter presents a hybrid conditional access system (CAS) for advanced terrestrial digital multimedia broadcasting (AT‐DMB). The proposed architecture is characterized by its use of a unified CAS channel and various communication networks for CAS message transmissions. We implement a prototype CAS based on the hybrid architecture, which improves the CAS message transmission efficiency greatly compared to the existing T‐DMB CAS standard and supports various AT‐DMB interlayer services more easily and efficiently.     

An Efficient Transmission Scheme of MPEG2‐TS over RTP for a Hybrid DMB System

Hybrid digital multimedia broadcasting (DMB) is a next‐generation mobile TV system that combines broadcasting and wireless communication networks and can provide various high‐quality multimedia services. However, if a system adheres to the current standard of transmitting the DMB content in the form of MPEG2‐TS through wireless networks, it results in a burden on the network due to low transmission efficiency. The reasons for the low transmission efficiency are as follows. First, due to its constant bitrate characteristic, DMB MPEG2‐TS includes a considerable amount of needless information, such as NULL packets and stuffing bytes. Second, due to the inflexibility of the Real‐time Transport Protocol (RTP) standard, one cannot fully utilize the maximum transmission unit of the network when converting MPEG2‐TS to RTP stream for transmission. This paper proposes a new transmission scheme that resolves these problems. Experiment results show that the proposed scheme improves data bitrate transmission efficiency by 8% to 36%, compared to the standard scheme, in the streaming of various real‐DMB contents.     

Pre‐filtering technique for MAI cancellation in MC‐CDMA systems

Multicarrier code division multiple access (MC‐CDMA), is a promising multiplexing technique for future communication systems. In this study, we employ the well‐known Walsh‐Hadamard spreading codes for synchronous downlink transmission of MC‐CDMA systems. The spreading codes allow that the frequency diversity to be efficiently exploited. However, multipath propagation may cause orthogonality among users is distorted, and this distortion produces multiple access interference (MAI). To eliminate this effect, we propose a pre‐filtering‐based MC‐CDMA system which uses a pre‐filtering technique at the transmitter and an equal gain combining (EGC) scheme at the receivers, respectively. Our proposed pre‐filtering technique transforms the transmitted signals so that the MAI can be eliminated, and the EGC scheme weights the signals received from all subcarriers so that channel distortions can be compensated. Furthermore, the proposed technique can calculate the transmitted power over all subcarriers to satisfy the required quality of service of each user and archive MAI‐free. In this paper, performance in terms of bit error rate is analyzed; in comparison with the EGC, orthogonal restoring combining, and maximal ratio combining schemes at receiver, respectively. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

数字化中波同步广播单频网的音频时延分析

随着广播电视技术的高速发展,广播电视信号的传输已经全部实现了数字化,数字化的音频在数字化传输途径中所产生的音频时延有很大的不同.介绍了组成中波同步广播单频网要素,针对单频网中同步发射台音频信号的各种传输途径,阐述数字化音频的各种传输方式,并具体分析每种传输方式所引起的音频信号时延.     

Multicast beamforming with LOS self‐interference cancellation in full‐duplex wireless communications

In this paper, we consider a full‐duplex system where the access point installed with multiple transmitting antennas and a single receiving antenna serves several single‐antenna remote users. In this case, there are 2 kinds of interferences. One is the near‐field self‐interference (SI) induced by the simultaneous transmitting and receiving over the same band, and the other is the cochannel interference caused by the multicast broadcasting in the same band. A problem of near‐field SI cancellation and the cochannel interference suppression using transmit beamforming is formulated at the access point. This problem of ensuring the near‐field line‐of‐sight SI suppression benchmark and maximizing the minimum received signal‐to‐interference‐plus‐noise ratio of remote receivers leads to a nonconvex NP‐hard optimization. Furthermore, we introduce a semidefinite relaxation technique coupled with linear program power adjustment and an outer bisection search loop to transform the problem into a convex optimization. This can be solved by the modern interior point methods. Simulations show that the proposed method is feasible even when the local receive antenna in near‐field and the remote receivers in far field are in the same direction.     

Performance of multi-level QAM with post-detection maximal ratiocombining space diversity for digital land-mobile radio communications

A new type of post-detection maximal ratio combining for space diversity receivers in digital land-mobile communications is proposed. The combining scheme is designed for multilevel quadrature amplitude modulation (QAM) and employs a pilot-symbol-aided fading estimator. It is realized at baseband using a digital signal processing (DSP) technique to simplify the receiver hardware. Computer simulation and laboratory experiments confirm that the proposed diversity scheme achieves a performance very close to that of ideal maximal ratio combining     

Privacy‐preserving multireceiver ID‐based encryption with provable security

Multireceiver identity (ID) based encryption and ID‐based broadcast encryption allow a sender to use the public identities of multiple receivers to encrypt messages so that only the selected receivers or a privileged set of users can decrypt the messages. It can be used for many practical applications such as digital content distribution, pay‐per‐view and multicast communication. For protecting the privacy of receivers or providing receiver anonymity, several privacy‐preserving (or anonymous) multireceiver ID‐based encryption and ID‐based broadcast encryption schemes were recently proposed, in which receiver anonymity means that nobody (including any selected receiver), except the sender, knows who the other selected receivers are. However, security incompleteness or flaws were found in these schemes. In this paper, we propose a new privacy‐preserving multireceiver ID‐based encryption scheme with provable security. We formally prove that the proposed scheme is semantically secure for confidentiality and receiver anonymity. Compared with the previously proposed anonymous multireceiver ID‐based encryption and ID‐based broadcast encryption schemes, the proposed scheme has better performance and robust security. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Array Processing for Multi-User Multi-Antenna Interference Channels Using Precoders

In this paper, we investigate how to send space-time codes with full diversity and low decoding complexity for interference channels using precoders. We assume that we have two transmitters and two receivers. Each transmitter sends codewords to respective receiver at the same time. We propose an orthogonal transmission scheme that combines space-time codes and array processing to achieve low-complexity decoding and full diversity for transmitted signals. To our best knowledge, this is the first scheme which can achieve low-complexity decoding and full diversity for any transmitted codeword in interference channel when all the users transmit at the same time. Simulation results validate our theoretical analysis.     

Audio Transcoding for Audio Streams from a T‐DTV Broadcasting Station to a T‐DMB Receiver

We propose an efficient audio transcoding algorithm that can convert audio streams from terrestrial digital television broadcasting service stations to those for terrestrial digital multimedia broadcasting hand‐held receivers. The proposed algorithm avoids the complicated psychoacoustic analysis by calculating the scalefactors of the bit‐sliced arithmetic coding encoder directly from the signal‐to‐noise ratio parameters of the AC‐3 decoder. The bit‐allocation process is also simplified by cascading the nested distortion control loop. Through subjective evaluation, it is shown that the proposed algorithm provides comparable audio quality to tandem coding but it requires much smaller complexity.