Efficient error correction solutions for OFDM based digital video

The robustness of the delivery of digital compressed video streams has always been one of the main topic of the standardization bodies to assure the Quality of the Service (QoS). The MPEG standard which is nowadays the reference for digital television defines how to format the various component parts of a multimedia program and how they are combined into a single transmission bit stream. Although the MPEG stream may be directly used over a wide variety of media, it may also be used over a communication network and it is already packetized into short data packets. The multiplexed stream can be transmitted over a variety of communication networks such as Radio Frequency links (UHF/VHF), Digital Satellite links, Cable TV Networks, Standard Terrestrial Communication Links (PDH, SDH) or Packet/Cell Links (ATM, IP, IPv6, Ethernet). In critical and error prone channels the robustness of the stream has to be granted by employing strong error correction schemes. Depending on the used media the transmission has its own coding scheme and modulation methods designed for the particular environment. For example, in the case of IP based links the transfer protocol accepts loss of data and the problem can be easily overcome by retransmission. Wireless simplex transmission cannot exploit the same approach. Wireless transmission always means variable channel conditions especially when one or both terminals are moving on the outfield. The channel fading evolution and the signal impairments increase the error rate and corrupt the data. In the recent past the standardization of the DVB-T shows the possibility to provide a robust service for digital video delivery. This standard provides superior picture quality with the opportunity to view pictures in standard format or wide screen (4/3 or 16/9) formats, services including subtitling, multiple audio tracks, interactive content, multimedia content where, for instance, programs may be linked to world wide web material. Beside the provided services and features the standard offers also a modulation and transmission scheme capable to cope with the impairments of the terrestrial channel and to provide a BER after forward-error correction below 10-12. Unfortunately, these performances are guaranteed only for fixed reception, since the standard was originally aimed to replace classical analog television broadcasting in the UHF band. This thesis addresses the study of enhanced error-correction schemes in the scope of a compact, flexible and robust high-throughput real time video transmission system able to cope with high mobility channels. The study of a transmission system and error correction scheme tailored for this kind of application is here presented. The system exploits the OFDM modulation technique. This modulation scheme has already proven to be very effective in hostile environments. A flexible modulation scheme is employed to obtain variable bandwidth transmission and enhanced performances especially for mobile applications. The main topic of this research is the study of an effective error correction scheme adapted to this application. While nowadays the digital television standards use a concatenated error correction scheme based on convolutional inner coder, in this work the proposed solution is based on a turbo inner coder. Turbo codes has already shown good performances compared to convolutional codes. These results are here applied to a concatenated scheme to obtain very low BER. A comparison of the performances of various turbo coding techniques under certain implementation constraints is done in this work.The second element of the error correction scheme is the channel interleaver used to average the channel fading in time and frequency. This mechanism is conceived to be adapted to the modulated bandwidth and is optimized for high throughput real time video. This study shows that the proposed system proves to be very effective in high mobile channels because of the deep averaging strategies in conjunction with the high efficiency turbo based concatenated error correction scheme.