Leveraging Digital Fountain Technology for Streaming DVB-H Applications - by Marshall Porter
In the past six months, we’ve heard of streaming-related pains in DVB-H, and have been approached by some of the largest players in mobile broadcast to evaluate if Digital Fountain’s technology would prove beneficial in streaming video over DVB-H, with a specific focus on the most prominent pain points: infrastructure costs, QoS, legacy equipment support, and migration. The answers are all an overwhelming yes, and I want to preview the findings of a white paper that we’ll publish in late January leading into Mobile World Congress.
Digital Fountain’s research team created DVB-endorsed simulators to emulate a DVB-H system, and the results were astounding. Link margin gains using Digital Fountain technology (compared to the status quo) were 2dB – 8dB, depending on the accepted latency varying from DVB-H typical latencies up to several seconds too translate those dB gains into meaningful numbers, we were informed by DVB-H operators:
Using Digital Fountain’s technology, and assuming a realistic link margin gain of 5dB, would allow an operator to deploy a broadcast network with half the investment in transmission towers, or to achieve a substantially better QoS with the same number of towers. In an instance of say, Italy, where the DVB-H rollout has cost upwards of 300m EUR, Digital Fountain solutions could yield a start-up infrastructure savings of 150m EUR, and that’s gathered the attention of a number of operators developing DVB-H solutions.
So the immediate question we always receive: Why does DVB-H streaming not include Digital Fountain’s technology? This is also quite simple, because DVB-H specifications were completed before Digital Fountain’s technology was available. But with our flexible software based solution, it is never too late – upgrade today, save from tomorrow on.
Of course, the same principle applies to other networks as well—MBMS, DVB-SH, MediaFLO, DMB, et al. It’s an interesting development and Digital Fountain will be working with operators globally to share the data in the coming months.