Efficient Transmission of Multiple Broadcasting Services Using LDM and SHVC

The Advanced Television System Committee (ATSC) is currently developing the next-generation U.S. Digital Terrestrial Television (DTT) standard, known as ATSC 3.0. Two disruptive technologies for the physical layer are being evaluated, Layer Division Multiplexing (LDM) and Time Frequency Slicing (TFS). LDM consist in the transmission of a signal composed of two independent signals (layers) which are superimposed together at different power levels. These two layer can be configured with the desired robustness and capacity. LDM enables the efficient provision of services addressed to mobile and fixed reception in a more efficient way than the classical Frequency Division Multiplexing (FDM) and Time Division Multiplexing (TDM) since full bandwidth and transmission time are used in both layers. However, practical operation is restricted due to several implementation constraints such as the use of common parameters and transmitter blocks for both layers (e.g. a common time interleaver). The use of TFS allows for an improved frequency diversity by the distribution of the service data across multiple Radio Frequency (RF) channels instead of using a single RF channel. The paper investigates the potential gains provided by the increased frequency diversity with TFS in conjunction with LDM.

Scalable High efficiency Video Coding (SHVC) is the scalable extension of the latest video coding standard High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC). One of the key novelties introduced by SHVC is that it enables hybrid codec scalability. This basically means that the video layers can be encoded with different video standards providing backward compatibility between codecs. In this paper, we propose a software parallel SHVC decoder in hybrid codec scalability configuration. The proposed design consists of an Advanced Video Coding (AVC) decoder for the Base Layer (BL) and a HEVC decoder for the Enhanced Layer (EL). In order to perform Inter Layer Prediction (ILP), a communication of decoding states and outputs is established between the two decoders. While the native frame based parallelism is still allowed within the two decoders, the proposed design also enables the use of frame based parallelism between the two decoders. The proposed software design enables a real time decoding of the HEVC EL at 2160p60 while the AVC base layer is decoded at 1080p60 for ×2 spatial scalability.

<p>Advanced Television Systems Committee (ATSC) 3.0, the new generation digital terrestrial television standard, has been designed for facing the new challenges of the future broadcasting systems. ATSC 3.0 has been built using the most recent cutting-edge technologies. Layered division multiplexing (LDM) is one of the major components of the new system baseline. LDM provides a tool to make flexible use of the spectrum for delivering simultaneous services to stationary and mobile services. This paper presents the performance evaluation of ATSC 3.0 core services in mobile scenarios using LDM. Simulation results are presented to analyze the influence of different LDM ensemble configuration modes for mobile reception. The simulation results have been also confirmed by laboratory tests under different channel models. The signal to noise ratio threshold values confirm the excellent behavior of ATSC 3.0 and LDM in mobile and portable scenarios.</p>

Video communication requires sufficient resources to obtain the desired image quality. Availability of bandwidth and screen resolution from different devices on the client end, as well as compression techniques used for transmission also significantly influence to the video quality. Even though the H.264/AVC video compression standard and its scalable extension is known as Scalable Video Coding (SVC) was introduced and successfully addressed the challenge, some weaknesses persist especially for high-resolution video transmissions. The size of the bitstream generated by the SVC standard for ultra-high resolution video compression can only be met if transmitted on a network with a large bandwidth. The Scalable High-Efficiency Video Coding (SHVC) were introduced to overcome problems in the SVC standards. The new video compression standard is proven to reduce bandwidth requirements by up to 46.41 % compared to the SVC standards for the same video quality. This study introduces the performance analysis of SHVC standard video transmission as compared to SVC standard. Both compression standards are transmitted and emulated through network emulator called Mininet-Wifi to get the real transmission picture. The client-server video transmission scheme with different bandwidth and various client position are set in the experiment scenario. It is found that transmission time, packet loss, and video reconstruction quality on scalable video transmission with SHVC standard is better than scalable video transmissions with SVC standard.

Digital video applications cover today a very large range of multimedia application: messaging, HD video telephony and video conferencing. etc. These heterogeneity motivated some years ago the development of the scalable video coding. Therefore, the Joint Collaborative Team on Video Coding (JCT-VC) has developed a new Scalable High efficiency Video Coding standard (SHVC) as an extension of HEVC. The SHVC may compress numerous video sequences of various resolutions as a single bit-stream using the inter layer prediction tools. In order to highlight the features' coding efficiency; several analyses were made using numerous High Definition (HD) sequences with various scenarios. In this paper an analysis study has done on the efficiency of SHVC. Results show that multicast coding using SHVC standard provides an average bit rate reduction of more than 30% compared to simulcast. These results demonstrate the improvement in coding efficiency of the SHVC solution with the introduction of inter-layer prediction.

Recent broadcast standards support Layered Division Multiplexing (LDM) to achieve graceful degradation as signal quality degrades at the receiver. LDM is accomplished by using different constellations within the same Radio Frequency (RF) spectrum. LDM thus enables delivering multiple service tiers in a single broadcast channel. LDM when used in conjunction with scalable source coding codecs such as the Scalable extension of High Efficiency Video Coding (SHVC), further helps improve overall spectrum utilization and efficiency. In this paper we investigate a 2-tier broadcast LDM based service with one service tier aimed at lower video resolution such as 540p, 720p, 1080p for a mobile receiver (smaller/indoor antenna) and the other service tier targeting twice the video resolution of the lower tier, for stationary receivers (larger/outdoor antenna). The primary contribution of this paper is to identify 2-tier transmission configurations of interest to broadcasters and compare the spectrum and bitrate coding efficiency gains of an SHVC-based multi-tier service versus a simulcast (single layer) based multi-tier service for an Advanced Television Systems Committee (ATSC) 3.0 transmission system. Bitrate savings ranging from 38% and 57% is observed for the SHVC based layered system. For large coverage and pedestrian with a receiver test scenarios, channel utilization savings ranging from 23% to 46% is observed. For mobile and tablet in bedroom scenarios a smaller broadcast bandwidth savings ranging from 6% to 9% is observed.

"(c) 2015 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other users, including reprinting/ republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted components of this work in other works.")

A fast CU depth level decision algorithm with low complexity for Scalable High Efficiency Video Coding (SHVC) is proposed to reduce the computational complexity caused by the recursive quad-tree structure of Coding Unit (CU) inherited from HEVC. The proposed scheme enables the early termination for CU sizes for intra prediction in the enhancement layer (EL) by using the property of the energy distribution in the current CTU and the optimal coding depths of the neighboring CTUs. Based on an adaptive thresholds scheme, the texture complexity can be categorized to three types and the CU depth level range is therefore narrowed correspondingly. Besides, the spatial correlation existing in the encoded neighboring CTUs is utilised to further reduce the number of Rate Distortion (RD) evaluation. The coding time is therefore significantly saved. The proposed algorithm is evaluated in the reference software of SHVC (SHM12.0). The experimental results shows that the reduction in encoding time can be up to 42.95% in comparison with the original encoding scheme in SHM.

Considering the need for a more powerful scalable video coding solution beyond the recent Scalable High Efficiency Video Coding (SHVC) standard, this paper proposes a novel SHVC improvement solution using the block based joint layer prediction creation. In the proposed improvement solution, the temporal correlation between frames is exploited through a motion compensated temporal interpolation (MCTI) mechanism. The MCTI frame is adaptively combined with the base layer reconstruction using a linear combination algorithm. In this combination, a weighting factor is defined and computed for each predicted block using the estimated errors associated to each prediction input. Finally, to achieve the highest compression efficiency, the fused frame is treated as an additional reference and adaptively selected using the rate distortion optimization (RDO) mechanism. Experiments conducted for a rich set of test conditions have shown that significant compression efficiency gains can be achieved with the proposed improvement solution, notably by up to 4.5 % BD-Rate savings on enhancement layer regarding the standard SHVC quality scalable codec.

Advanced Television Systems Committee (ATSC) 3.0 standard does not support the combined structure of layered division multiplexing (LDM) and multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO). Recently, previous works have evaluated the theoretical performance of LDM plus MIMO structure for enhanced system capacity. However, the practical performance for the structure has not been investigated yet over the realistic channels. This paper presents the practical performance of the layered MIMO broadcasting system evaluated by a working prototype. To this end, the ATSC 3.0-centric prototype transmitter and receiver are implemented. Based on the real hardware solutions, the laboratory-measured transmission performance is analyzed with respect to the crosstalk power within the MIMO channel, i.e., cross-polarization discrimination (XPD).

With a new video coding standard high efficiency video coding (HEVC), the ultra high definition (UHD) TV service with robust video streaming technology is emerging in the TV industry. This paper addresses the system architecture for the UHD video streaming and proposes two main ideas: (i) picture prioritization method, (ii) error concealment mode signaling (ECMS). In the experiments using HEVC reference model conducted, the proposed picture prioritization method shows the gains in video quality from 2.2 to 7.5 dB in Y-PSNR, and the error concealment mode signaling gains from 0.2 to 2.5 dB in Y-PSNR, with corresponding subjective improvements.

SHVC performance enhancement using superior step search algorithm

In this paper, we present performance evaluation of multiple physical layer pipe (PLP) based layered division multiplexing (LDM) systems for the next generation terrestrial broadcasting. In addition to a conventional multiple-PLP configuration, which is based on time division multiplexing (TDM), a variety of LDM configurations, which includes combinations of TDM and two-layer LDM, and three-layer LDM, are considered. Given three different broadcasting contents are delivered by three PLPs, performance comparison and analysis are provided when four different multiple-PLP configurations including TDM, two-layer LDM, and three-layer LDM are used.

The most recent standard for broadcast services, Advanced Television System Committee—Third Generation (ATSC 3.0), has adopted co-located multi-antenna schemes and Layered Division Multiplexing (LDM) in order to increase the capacity and reliability compared to former Digital Terrestrial Television (DTT) systems. ATSC 3.0 has adopted both technologies separately, but no combination of them is planned yet. Compared to baseline LDM case, use of several antennas allows for diverse parametrization for each layer. This paper analyzes the potential combination of co-located Multiple-Input–Multiple-Output (MIMO) schemes with LDM. A trade-off analysis between complexity constraints and performance benefits is evaluated.

In ATSC 3.0 physical layer standard, a layered division multiplexing (LDM) scheme has newly accepted as one of the multiplexing schemes in order to improve the reception performance when multiple broadcasting contents are simultaneously delivered through a single RF channel. This paper presents comparison results of LDM and time division multiplexing (TDM) schemes under fixed reception environments, and analyzes the performance gain of LDM over TDM. From the field test results, it was confirmed that the LDM gain in the theoretical analysis is still maintained in the actual field.