Spatial and temporal packet recovery schemes for DVB-H systems through IP-relay wireless networks

Abstract—The DVB-H standard has been defined to provide digital video broadcast to mobile handheld devices. However, without a request channel, a handheld device may encounter data loss and thus it requires an additional recovery architecture to relieve this problem. In this paper, we follow the DVB-IPDC standard and propose combining a DVB-H system with an IP-relay wireless network. A handheld device losing DVB-H data can thus request the relay network for retransmission. Under this architecture, we identify two critical issues, group packet loss (GPL) and broadcast data handover (BDH). The GPL problem occurs when there are bursty requests for retransmissions of the same data with high spatial and temporal locality, causing network congestion. The BDH problem occurs when these re-questing devices move out of their current serving cells. In this paper, we propose a bulk request recovery (BRR) scheme to solve these problems by exploiting spatial and temporal locality of recovery requests. Our scheme can efficiently reduce duplicate requests and schedule retransmissions of lost packets, so both GPL and BDH problems are relieved. Simulations results are also presented to verify the effectiveness of our result. Index Terms—broadcasting network, DVB-H, error recovery, scheduling, video broadcast, wireless network. I