Field trial of a redundancy on demand DVB-T2 system

Different digital terrestrial television (DTT) systems are in use around the world today. A rapidly growing number of TV sets used for terrestrial broadcast reception is also equipped with broadband connectivity. However, the distribution of TV content relies either solely on terrestrial broadcast or on broadband delivery. Redundancy on Demand (RoD) on the other hand utilizes the broadband connectivity to enhance terrestrial broadcast reception. RoD is a fully backward compatible extension to terrestrial broadcast systems. It provides supporting data, i.e. additional redundancy, on demand to broadcast receivers via a broadband connection. Receivers even in unfavorable reception conditions are then able to successfully decode the broadcast signal. The supporting data is provided by an RoD server extending the broadcast network. An RoD DTT receiver is able to estimate the signal quality, request and receive the redundancy data if required and decode the broadcast signal with the help of the broadband data. As the second generation terrestrial Digital Video Broadcasting (DVB-T2) will be introduced in Germany starting in 2016, a DVB-T2 trial network was set up in Berlin. This network gave the opportunity to evaluate the performance of RoD with DVB-T2 in a real world environment. This paper presents results of the field trial.