Migration to capacity approaching codes for digital video broadcasting
S. Honary, Nishit Pandya, Garik Markarian, B. Honary · IEE Proceedings - Communications · 2005
DVB-S2 is the recently defined successor to the current DVB-S standard and DVB-DSNG standard (EN 301210); enabling new services via significantly higher data rates through the application of BCH concatenated with LDPC capacity-approaching codes. Owing to the vast amount of DVB-S receivers already deployed one of the key issues with standardising DVB-S2 has been the case for backwards compatibility and enabling long-term migration. This in turn has led to the introduction of non-uniform, asymmetric 8-PSK hierarchical modulation (H-Mod) scheme; whereby the high performance BCH-LDPC codes are challenged to enable quasi-error-free performance on the H-Mod low priority data stream. This paper aims to analyse this approach and identify the extent to which H-Mod will have an effect on both DVB-S (RS-Viterbi) and DVB-S2 (BCH-LDPC) performance. The paper provides analysis of a future commercial application of capacity-approaching codes within DVB-S2 and most importantly the methodology for DVB-S2 migration; which currently is a key issue for DVB-S2 service providers in order to maintain signal quality and ensure data throughput over various time-varying channels. Simulation results have been obtained using VHDL FPGA implementations and C++ simulations; these results are individually presented and discussed. From these results it has been concluded that introduction of additional DVB-S2 services using H-Mod can provide a means for significant enhancement of the existing DVB systems, thus proving the viability of H-Mod for long term migration to DVB-S2.