IP over DVB-T: The Use and Performance of IP-protocols in Terrestrial Digital Television Broadcast

The evolution in satellite digital broadcast has lead to wide variety of Internet and multimedia applications even in few first years of service launch. DVB is expected to be prominent television broadcast standard for next decades also in terrestrial television. While being member of same protocol family, terrestrial digital television (DVB-T) sets quite different constraints on performance than satellite digital television (DVB-S). Main problems in satellite digital broadcast and IP-protocols lie on long delays and TCPcongestion. Problems in terrestrial digital broadcast are related on limited bandwidth and amount of users and suitable applications. Other problems are caused by terrestrial radio channel properties. Problems also change in different areas and countries due to population density, legislation and different broadcast scheme. Future evolution on portability and mobility has also effects on use and performance of IPprotocols. Mobile IP and multicast in IPv4 and especially in IPv6 offer solution to handle mobility in network protocol layer. This study is a part of Finnish 3G-project, in which this subproject is aiming for development of mobile DVB/IP terminal. 3G-project is joint research project for implementing all-IP networks in 3 generation mobile networks. In this paper I compare suitability and performance of different protocols starting from link layer up to application level in DVB-T broadcast environment.