Editorial ConvergenceofDigitalTVSystemsandServicesdownloads.hindawi.com/journals/ijdmb/2009/817636.pdf · 2German Aerospace Center (DLR), Institute of Communications and Navigation,

Hindawi Publishing CorporationInternational Journal of Digital Multimedia BroadcastingVolume 2009, Article ID 817636, 3 pagesdoi:10.1155/2009/817636

Editorial

Convergence of Digital TV Systems and Services

Maurizio Murroni,1 Sandro Scalise,2 Alessandro Vanelli-Coralli,3

Sooyoung Kim,4 and Robert Briskman5

1 DIEE, University of Cagliari, 09123 Cagliari, Italy2 German Aerospace Center (DLR), Institute of Communications and Navigation, 82234 Wessling, Germany3 DEIS/ARCES, University of Bologna, Viale Risorgimento 2, 40125 Bologna, Italy4 College of Engineering, Chonbuk National University, Jeonju 561-756, South Korea5 Sirius XM Radio Inc., USA

Correspondence should be addressed to Maurizio Murroni, [email protected]

Received 24 December 2009; Accepted 24 December 2009

Copyright © 2009 Maurizio Murroni et al. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons AttributionLicense, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properlycited.

The migration from analog to digital of the broadcastingtechnologies, already well consolidated for satellite systems,is becoming a reality also for terrestrial transmission. DigitalTerrestrial Television (DTT) is also evolving to offer interac-tive services and a degree of flexibility which can be exploitedto offer tailored applications to users which include, forinstance interactivity, different levels of personalization, andinnovative location-based, as well as context-aware, services.A clear example of this trend is given by the rising successof the Internet Protocol Television (IPTV) which allows fora degree of flexibility on offered services unknown to thetraditional broadcasting systems. In this framework, severalsatellite operators are starting to launch IPTV services usingdirect satellite links, as well as some terrestrial internet serviceproviders are offering digital TV channels embedded in theIP streaming over XDSL. Furthermore, IPTV services arelikely to be broadcast also wirelessly, exploiting advancedbroadband access technologies such as WiMAX, LTE, or LTE-A. Last, but not least, TV and broadcast services for mobileusers have also been deployed in many countries using DVB-H and will be soon available on an even broader scale thanksto its satellite counterpart, DVB-SH. In the near future, aset of different technologies able to offer personalized andcustomized services to different classes of users are expectedin the area of wireless broadcasting and convergence of tech-nologies is auspicious. This concept entails different levelsof convergence, namely, at terminal level (one device fitsall), at service level (convergence of traditional fixed, mobile,and broadcast services), and at transport and network level

with a common and standardized set of protocols and ataccess layer thanks to the harmonic coexistence of differentradio technologies. This special issue aims to capture thestate-of-the-art research work concerning the integration ofDTT/Satellite/IPTV systems for the broadcasting of multi-media and interactive services.

There are very different directions in which researchersinvestigate new solutions in order to improve the qualityof the rich media content delivered over various networktypes. In this context, this special issue illustrates some ofthese avenues and presents some of the most significant andpromising results.

Papers have been grouped into four thematic sections.The first section is devoted to Mobile Television and

Interactive Multimedia Broadcasting Services. The first paperentitled “Converged digital TV services: the role of mid-dleware and future directions of interactive television”provides a brief overview of digital TV converged services,to present and categorize the digital Television middlewaretechnologies that contributed to it as well as possible futuretrends and directions. A new Television era of convergedwireless and mobile content delivery, user-authored content,multimodal interaction, intelligent personalization, smartspace awareness and 3D content sensations is foreseen,creating ambient and immersive experiences. The followingone entitled “Interactive digital terrestrial television, theinteroperability challenge in Brazil” introduces differentstandards implemented in existing Digital Terrestrial Televi-sion Broadcasting systems to allow the fruition of interactive

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2 International Journal of Digital Multimedia Broadcasting

services and applications through digital Set Top Boxes. Itfocuses on the interoperability issue between the Brazilianand the European architectures. Efforts in this area arereported from a Brazilian perspective including work toharmonize Brazilian and European standards. A wide varietyof architectures, methods, and systems are reviewed toprovide such applications, particularly for learning uses. Inthe third paper “Sofa-TV: the new digital landscape” theauthors address the current state of channel offerings forthe so-called Sofa-TV, that is, all digital television offersviewed through the “traditional” television screen. In thiscontext, three digital platforms, Sat TV, DTT, and IPTV, areconsidered. After a description of the commercial offer, theauthors identify the principal players and their strategies,in order to provide a few predictions as to the possiblefuture changes in the industry. The analysis, carried outin the Italian context, has a general applicability and theconclusions apply to the general market.

The second section deals with Hybrid Cellular/Non-Cellular Broadcasting and contains three papers. The first oneentitled “MBMS—IP multicast/broadcast in 3G Networks”extensively describes MBMS for 3GPP network, includingthe main features, architectural overview, and capabilitiesof MBMS added on various protocol stacks. As a use case,Mobile TV over MBMS in UMTS is addressed by usingsimulation results on capacity improvement by MBMS.MBMS evolution issues are also addressed. The secondentitled “Video streaming transfer in a smart satellite mobileenvironment” concentrates on video streaming providedon buses that move in urban, suburban, or highway envi-ronments. A contents’ source utilizes a satellite DVB-S2link for transmitting video streams to a bus, which, in itsturn, relays it to its passengers’ devices. A bus works ina smart mode taking advantage of the knowledge of theexact points where it will not receive the satellite signal fora certain time period, due to fixed obstacles. Finally, thethird one entitled “Modeling and performance analyses ofhybrid cellular and broadcasting networks” considers thecombination of the cellular network UMTS and the mobilebroadcast network DVB-H, which form a hybrid network.The authors investigate the performance of hybrid networksand develop a system model, which describes the hybridnetwork and the load switching between both networks.

The third section addresses Source and Channel CodingModulation and Signal Processing for Mobile MultimediaBroadcasting and it comprises four papers. The first one“Multiple description coding using data hiding and regionsof interest for broadcasting applications” presents an inno-vative scheme for multiple description coding (MDC) withregions of interest (ROI) support to be adopted in highquality television. The scheme proposes to split the streaminto two separate descriptors and to preserve the quality ofthe region of interest, even in case one descriptor is com-pletely lost. To demonstrate its effectiveness, the algorithmhas been implemented in two different scenarios, using thereference H.264/AVC codec and an MPEG framework toevaluate the performance in absence of motion-compensatedframes on 720p video sequences. The next paper, entitled“Slow motion and zoom in HD digital videos using fractals”

presents an alternative technique combining fractals theoryand wavelet decomposition to achieve spatial zoom and slowmotion replay of HD digital color video sequences. Fast scenechange detection, active scene detection, wavelet subbandanalysis and, color fractal coding based on Earth Mover’sDistance (EMD) measure are used to reduce computationalload and to improve visual quality. In “AL-FEC for Improvedmobile reception of MPEG-2 DVB-T transport streams,” theauthors investigate the use of application layer FEC pro-tection in DVB-T (Digital Video Broadcasting-Terrestrial)networks for the provision of mobile services. The paperdiscusses some implementation aspects of AL-FEC in realscenarios and proposes an implementation based on Raptorcodes and hash sequences. In the last work, entitled “Theimplementation of a 2/4/8 antennas configurable diversityOFDM receiver for mobile HDTV applications” a mobileOFDM receiver LSI is developed which includes two pre-FFT adaptive array (AA) antenna combiners and a post-FFTcarrier diversity (CD) combiner. Using the LSI, several com-binations of AA and CD diversity system can be configured asa trade-off approach to improve the performance of mobileISDB-T receiver with reasonable system cost. The paper dealswith the use of antenna diversity to improve the serviceavailability for HDTV. Both simulation and measurementresults are presented.

The last section covers System and Service for IPTVand Interactive TV. In the first paper “Theoretical modelsfor video on demand services on peer-to-peer networks,”the authors study the scenario P2P-based VoD servicesand propose four models of the peer behavior to evaluatethe impact of the peer churn on the system performance.The models are compared by computing the resource thatsystem has to add on top of the P2P network to satisfyall the download requests. Simulations show importantrelationships between playback buffer length, peer requestrate, peer average lifetime, and server upload rate. Thesecond paper, entitled “A software and hardware IPTVarchitecture for scalable DVB distribution,” deals with theproblem of mapping popular public broadcast services suchas DVB or ATSC to IPTV with acceptable effort to IP-basedtelevision (IPTV). The authors propose a mapping using alight weight framework as an important step towards all-IPmultimedia. Then, they present the Net-Ceiver architecturebased on well-known standards such as IPv6, which allowszero configuration and high scalability. They also describea low-cost FPGA implementation of the proposed Net-Ceiver architecture, which can concurrently stream servicesfrom up to six full transponders. The last paper is entitled“Concept for mobility and interconnections aspects in con-verged NGN based IPTV architecture” and discusses severalpotential architectures implementing the converged NGNIPTV concept. In this direction, ETSI TISPAN and ITU-Tarchitecture for IPTV (IMS and non-IMS) are considered. Inparticular, an evolution of IMS-based IPTV where a singleplatform can serve multiple access networks is describedalong with several application scenarios. Last but not least,the paper “P2P and MPEG FGS encoding: a good recipe formultipoint video transmission in the internet” proposes amultipoint video broadcast framework over a heterogeneous

International Journal of Digital Multimedia Broadcasting 3

content distribution P2P network. In the proposed systemthe source generated the video flow by using an MPEG-4/FGS encoder, in such a way that no losses occur at the Base-layer stream even in the presence of short-term bandwidthfluctuations. Several solutions to this have been proposed butadoption has been hindered by many difficulties, particularlyefficiency. Simulations of performance are presented whichshow that good efficiency would be achieved.

Maurizio MurroniSandro Scalise

Alessandro Vanelli-CoralliSooyoung Kim

Robert Briskman

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Editorial ConvergenceofDigitalTVSystemsandServicesdownloads.hindawi.com/journals/ijdmb/2009/817636.pdf · 2German Aerospace Center (DLR), Institute of Communications and Navigation,