Quality Based Handoff in DVB-H Systems Assisted by Cellular Network

This paper introduces a novel seamless handoff approach for DVB-H networks aimed at reducing the user terminal power consumption and at making the handoff algorithm be driven by the quality of the user received signal. This implies the substitution of standard RSSI-based procedures with a method based on the Modulation Error Rate (MER) monitoring. The additional use of an underlying cellular network, for DVB-H related data delivering, allows to achieve additional advantages: a superior power saving and a faster handoff execution. Obtained results suggest that the DVB-H handoff protocol design is an issue, which definitely deserves further investigation in the view of making DVB-H an effective solution for delivering broadcast content to mobile users.