The goal of the lecture is to understand the basic architecture of a broadcasting network, the underlying technologies such as the transmission systems, audio and video source coding and conditional access technologies.
With respect to transmission systems, only the basic aspects of modulation and forward error correction techniques for different transmission channels are covered. For terrestrial transmission the multipath channel and for satellite transmission the Gaussian or Land-Mobile-Satellite channel is relevant. To complete the picture, some of the non-technical constraints such as business model, frequency spectrum management are covered.
An overview of the DVB standard (as the most widely used standard) is given, with emphasis on the transport mechanisms such as the MPEG transport stream. Various members of the DVB family of standards are presented, such as the DVB-S, DVB-T and DVB-H. Also, some recent extensions of these standards such as DVB-S2, DVB-T2 and DVB-SH are mentioned.
Moreover, broadcasting mechanisms used in present and future mobile communication networks such as the MBMS standard (which is part of the 3G mobile communication standard), the broadcasting mechanisms in the new LTE (Long Term Evolution Standard) and other standards such as MEDIA FLO are shown.
The lecture will also deal with data broadcasting applications based on digital broadcasting transport mechanisms.