Broadcast Convergence — Bringing Efficiency to a New Platform

Television Broadcasters have entered a new competitive era. The inherent efficiency of broadcast technology's ‘one-to-many’ platform has become widely understood. Mobile Network Operators (MNOs) are exploring use of LTE Evolved Multicast Broadcast Multimedia Service (eMBMS). I will briefly explore several technologies that tie together and compliment what could become a “Next Generation Broadcast Television” (Next Gen) standard with a Physical/Mac Layer in a new topology that supports multiple broadcast services in a spectrum efficient manner. The paper's main focus will be on a new IP-centric “Broadcast Convergence Gateway” node and the interrelated infrastructure components that could enable intelligent and collaborative use of broadcast television spectrum for a wide variety of future Fixed, Portable, Mobile and converged services in the USA. The coordination needs associated with convergence of what could be a new / future Next Gen broadcast standard and 3GPP LTE-Advanced will be an example explored. This paper will convey an understanding of the ‘value added’ by such an approach to the participants (MNOs, Broadcasters and others) in a more efficient ‘shared spectrum’ capability that can be leveraged to deal with bandwidth constraints of today's wireless providers competing for spectrum. The nature of the infrastructure interconnect and shared resources will be laid-out and a new understanding of what is possible in such a combined ‘Intelligent Broadcast Overlay’ will be discussed.

Published

2011-10

Content type

Original Research

Keywords

Broadcast Overlay, LTE, eMBMS, 3GPP, Mobile, Convergence

DOI

10.5594/M001105

ISBN

978-1-61482-940-9