A New Solution for Wireless Interactive TV Based on DVB-T Standard and SFDMA Technique

The recent establishment and implementation in Europe of the DVB-T standard for digital terrestrial television has opened a broad range of applications beyond the pure broadcasting services of digital TV. The European ACTS iTTi project (‘interactive terrestrial TV integration’ with more than 12 European partners) has been started in March 1998 to define the system specifications of an enhancement of DVB-T standard towards wireless interactive applications. The downstream of the iTTi interactive system (from the base station to the user) is simply DVB-T, to allow full compliance with the pure broadcasting services in the terrestrial network (UHF/VHF band), while the upstream (return channel) is based on a newly proposed approach called Synchronous Frequency Division Multiple Access (SFDMA); such approach is basically a combination of TDMA and FDMA in order to build a multiple carrier return channel, that will be available for multiple users to feed back to the base station through the same set-top antenna. The iTTi project are prototyping a complete hardware demonstrator for field trials and lab test in co-operation with European broadcasters in summer 98. In view of a VLSI implementation of the proposed system, a complexity estimation and optimised architectural solutions will be carried out.

Published

1999-07

Content type

Original Research

DOI

10.5594/M001180

ISBN

978-1-61482-948-5