T1: Digital Multimedia Broadcasting

Giovanni Corazza
"Digital Multimedia Broadcasting"

Digital Multimedia Broadcasting (DMB) is today a hot issue in both satellite and terrestrial communication networks communities. DMB applications target horizontal mass-markets, and are expected to have a very important impact in terms of diffusion of value-added services. Several standards and technologies are being developed to take full advantage of this ripe market opportunity, among which: MBMS within 3GPP, DVB-H in the DVB forum, S-DMB within the satellite community and the ETSI S-UMTS group. All of these standards pursue the identification of the optimum provision mechanism for multimedia broadcast services, while preserving compliance with existing system architectures and air interfaces. However, they all have advantages and disadvantages which render their mutual comparison a non-trivial task. The tutorial aims at describing the various provision mechanisms for DMB services, and addresses a comparison between terrestrial and satellite broadcasting.

In particular, the contents of the tutorial will be organized as follows:

• DMB opportunities and systems
• DVB standards: DVB-T/H
• IMT2000 UMTS-MBMS
• S-DMB - Conclusions: positioning of different systems