Improved Reception Schemes for Digital Video Broadcasting Based on Hierarchical Modulation

Abstract

In this paper, we first provide an overview of Hierarchical Modulation (HM) along with the opportunities offered by this modulation in the context of the recent Digital Video Broadcasting standard for Satellite to Handheld devices (DVB-SH).With HM, the binary data is partitioned into a “high-priority” (HP) and a “low-priority” (LP) bit stream that are separately and independently encoded before being mapped on non-uniformly spaced constellation points. We will show that the robustness of the HP stream is obtained at the expense of performance degradation of the less protected LP stream with respect to a non-hierarchical modulation. To overcome this inherent drawback of HM, we propose two different reception schemes for improving the bit error rate performance of the less protected LP stream, while keeping the HP decoding performance unchanged. The important point is that in one of the proposed reception schemes, the performance improvement is achieved together with the reduction of the receiver’s complexity.