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 strategies 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 cumulative 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.