Improving Broadcast Channel Rate Using Hierarchical Modulation

Conference: European Wireless 2012 - 18th European Wireless Conference 2012
04/18/2012 - 04/20/2012 at Poznan, Poland

Proceedings: European Wireless 2012

Pages: 5Language: englishTyp: PDF

Authors:
Méric, Hugo; Lacan, Jérôme; Boucheret, Marie-Laure (TéSA, Toulouse, France)
Méric, Hugo; Lacan, Jérôme; Boucheret, Marie-Laure (Université de Toulouse, Toulouse, France)
Arnal, Fabrice (Thales Alenia Space, Toulouse, France)
Lesthievent, Guy (CNES, Toulouse, France)

Abstract:
We investigate the design of a broadcast system where the aim is to maximise the throughput. This task is usually challenging due to the channel variability. Modern satellite communications systems such as DVB-SH and DVB-S2 mainly rely on time sharing strategy to optimize throughput. They consider hierarchical modulation but only for unequal error protection or backward compatibility purposes. We propose in this article to combine time sharing and hierarchical modulation together and show how this scheme can improve the performance in terms of available rate. We present the gain on a simple channel modeling the broadcasting area of a satellite. Our work is applied to the DVB-SH standard, which considers hierarchical modulation as an optional feature.