Design of DAB/DVB Based Multimedia Radio Networks for Mixed Broadcasting and Personal Services

| The introduction of personal services besides conventional broadcasting in DAB/DVB networks imposes new demands on the network architecture. The term \per-sonal service" means that some portion of the digital broadcasting bandwidth is reserved for transmitting information that is intended to only a limited number of users, or to only a single receiver. Examples for such services are the distribution of electronic multimedia newspapers to its subscribers or the premium quality mobile Internet access, where DAB/DVB network is used as a shared broadband downlink channel. The total capacity demand of the user population and its spatial distribution have to be taken into account when planning the radio coverage for DAB/DVB networks. In this paper we formulate the network planning problem with this additional requirement as an optimization problem, where the objective is to minimize the network cost while satisfying both the capacity and the signal quality constraints. We also propose an eecient heuristic algorithm that uses linear programming steps to iteratively build the network. We demonstrate that such a simple algorithm can provide solutions in aaordable time for DAB/DVB planning problems of practically interesting complexity.