A Unified Broadcast Layer for Horizon 2020 Delivery of Multimedia Services

It is expected that, in the coming years, the video data traffic carried by mobile networks will increase drastically. Among the different ways of facing this “mobile data tsunami,” the cooperation of several complementary access technologies offers promising prospects. In the context of such a cooperative approach, this paper proposes the definition of a unified broadcast layer, close to the 3GPP LTE technology, and therefore liable to be easily integrated in mobile devices and infrastructure equipment. The general technical requirements for the design of such a common physical layer are detailed and a practical example based on the 3GPP LTE/E-MBMS and DVB-T2 standards is described. The verification of the proposed approach is performed through simulation results and validation tests carried out on a hardware platform.