Performance Evaluation of Channel Change for DVB-SH Streaming Services

The Digital Video Broadcasting Satellite services to Handhelds (DVB-SH) is a hybrid satellite/terrestrial system for the broadcasting of multimedia services to mobile receivers. To mitigate deep signal fading events occurring mainly in the land-mobile satellite channel, a Multi-Protocol-Encapsulation Inter-burst Forward Error Correction (MPE-IFEC) technique has been recently introduced. It is based on a clever organization of data and parities offering long interleaving. Two decoding modes have been proposed: the late decoding mode and the early decoding mode. In this paper, we propose to discuss and to analyse the impact of these decoding strate-gies on the channel change delay, known as the key issue of DVB-SH system. Based on an end-to-end DVB-SH network simulator, two criteria: the channel change delay and the cu-mulative freeze time, are computed by considering different MPE-IFEC parameters and typical DVB-SH propagation environments. These two criteria are sufficient to give us the subjective video quality of the newly joined channel.