A frame-related approach for performance improvement of MPE-FEC in DVB-H

Digital Video Broadcasting-Handheld (DVB-H) is a new digital terrestrial broadcasting standard customized for the multimedia service on the mobile devices and the handheld terminals. It introduces a technique known as multi-protocol encapsulation forward error correction (MPE-FEC) for the IP-datagrams in the data link layer to improve the mobile performance. Every MPE-FEC frame is constructed independently in the DVB-H standard. In this paper, a frame-related coding approach for MPE-FEC frames is proposed. When a MPE-FEC frame is built during the data link layer encoding process, the rightmost n columns in the MPE part of the current MPE-FEC frame are filled with the data populated from the leftmost n columns of its previous MPE-FEC frame. After the encoding process, a correlation is set up between the adjacent frames. This correlation can be utilized by the proposed decoding algorithm to enhance the error correction capability. The theoretical analysis and simulations results show that the proposed approach can provide better error correction capability than the DVB-H standard as well as the conventional zero-padding method in random noise channels. As a more efficient decoding strategy, the proposed approach is a good candidate for the decoding of MPE-FEC frame.