Application layer FEC with long time interleaver and fast tune-in for mobile satellite TV services

Satellite distribution provides a cost-efficient way to expand the coverage of mobile networks to rural areas. However, to become widely accepted by users and content providers, mobile satellite services need to provide a Quality of Experience (QoE) comparable to that of mobile video services provided in cellular networks. Mobile reception by satellite is characterized by shadowing periods where the Line-Of-Sight (LoS) is lost. The only way to overcome these outage periods is to provide the means for implementing long time interleaving. Nonetheless, existing approaches for long time interleaving come at the cost of a long service tune-in time, which may last in the satellite case up to several seconds. The present work aims at demonstrating the achievable performance using an innovative approach based on the use of long time interleaving and fast service tune-in by means of application-layer forward error correction (AL-FEC), Scalable Video Coding (SVC) and unequal time interleaving. Within this work we show the performance of the novel approach in the satellite context comparing it to existing solutions.