Field measurement based SVC performance analysis over DVB-T2 Lite

The DVB-T2 standard introduces the possibility to use several physical streams in one transmission multiplex. These streams can be transmitted using different modulation and physical layer code rates, providing unequal error protection. The Scalable Video Coding (SVC) extension of H.264 provides video content where video with different quality can be partitioned into separate bit streams. When applying SVC in a DVB-T2 system, the base layer bit stream of the video can be broadcasted with high error protection, whereas enhancement layers, e.g. high definition, can be transmitted with lower error protection, but with higher bandwidth utilization. In this paper, broadcasting of SVC in a DVB-T2 Lite system is explored. Given equal bandwidth utilization and video quality constraints, the broadcasting of SVC video is compared to the simulcasting of separately coded H.264/AVC video streams. The study is based on a time series of real world measured signal strengths combined with DVB-T2 Lite physical layer simulations, and the results indicate that broadcasting of SVC provides an overall better end-user experience as compared to simulcasting of AVC video.