Physical layer DVB-SH performance prediction based on mutual information

Abstract

Digital Video Broadcasting-Satellite Handled (DVB-SH) is a hybrid satellite terrestrial broadcasting standard dedicated to provide video or audio services for handheld terminals. On the satellite part, this standard can make use of interleaving mechanisms to mitigate the effects of the Land Mobile Satellite channel. As a result, these mechanisms enable the in-time distribution of a codeword over a duration ranging from 100 ms to about 30 s, depending on their parameters. This mechanism significantly improves the error recovery performance of the code; however in the literature, a theoretical evaluation at system level of this improvement is missing. Moreover, carrying out Monte-Carlo simulations implementing real decoding processes on significant traveled distances is time prohibitive. We propose hereafter a prediction method compatible with fast simulations to quantitatively evaluate the system performance in terms of Rate, Erroneous Second Ratio, and zapping time. This method is based on the computation of the mutual information between emitted and received symbols for QPSK modulation and turbo coding. We demonstrate that our method reaches a prediction precision of the order of 0.1 dB, which is significantly better than two classical prediction methods. Moreover, our solution reduces the simulation time by a factor of 500 compared with Monte-Carlo. Beyond DVB-SH application, the presented approach can be applied in a large panel of satellite mobile systems and is completely new for the satellite community.