Performance of the File Delivery Protocols over Mobile TV Interactive Channels

The recent IP-based mobile TV standards, such as DVB-IPDC and OMA BCAST, employ both unidirectional broadcast networks and mobile interactive networks for hybrid service delivery. For these mobile TV standards, the performance of the file delivery protocol over broadcast channels (i.e., the IETF FLUTE protocol) is well studied in the literature. However, the performance characteristics of the file delivery protocols available in the mobile TV interactive channels (i.e., the HTTP and FLUTE protocols) are still unclear in the current stage. Hence, in this paper, we provide a performance study of the HTTP and FLUTE protocols in the context of mobile TV file delivery over a WiMAX-based interactive channel, for both stationary and vehicular users. The experiment results show that FLUTE with Raptor FEC can exhibit obvious performance gain than HTTP for delivering large files. In addition, FLUTE with Raptor FEC can coping long shadowing when moving through the outage areas of WiMAX signal, but in contrast HTTP connections are possible to be broken under the same signal condition.