ETSI technical standards for satellite digital radio

The European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI) is a non‐profit organization that creates technical standards for different areas of telecommunications. The ETSI activity satellite digital radio (SDR) addresses networks where satellite transmission is used for broadcasting directly to mobile receivers and is complemented by terrestrial transmitters. ETSI standards allow implementing parts of such systems in an interoperable way. A standardized radio interface enables a mass market for consumer reception devices and could become a regulatory requirement. ETSI, so far, has created standards for the physical layer of the radio interface. State‐of‐the‐art technology for multiplexing, interleaving, modulation and coding is applied. The system is broken down into parts that are covered by separate standards, which allows combining with other existing or future specifications. The standards cover the direct satellite transmission and the complementary terrestrial transmission, with both their particular impairments and conditions. A sophisticated time interleaving allows one to overcome signal blockage in a way that increases the ‘zapping time’ only slightly. The physical layer standards can be combined with existing standards for audio/video coding and encapsulation, in particular from MPEG and DVB. ETSI is planning to create further standards for the SDR system. First networks that apply the SDR technology are expected in 2008. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.