Quality assessment for terrestrial digital video broadcast over optical wireless communication-passive optical network under moderately turbulent regime with spatial diversity

The preceding decade has seen successful rollout of 5G and convergence of broadcast broadband and telecom sector. The near future bandwidth demands for services such as advanced immersive multimedia are even more challenging. This has led to advent of 6G. The access technologies need to provide virtually unlimited data rates to support majority of applications in 6G. The optical wireless communication (OWC) with its inherent advantages is a potential enabler in this scenario. However, phenomenon such as atmospheric turbulence poses a serious degradation to performance of such systems. For multimedia services, end user perception is the ultimate quality indicator. To ascertain this quality in quantitative terms, full reference quality metrics are employed for communication purposes. In this paper, digital video broadcasting terrestrial (DVB-T) videos with varying complexities are transmitted over OWC-passive optical network (PON) architecture. For performance enhancement 2 x 2 repetitive coding MIMO is employed with maximal ratio combining receiver. A total of 6 video quality assessment (VQA) metrics are evaluated for the system w.r.t channel parameter as Rytov variance. For all the VQA metrics, an enhancement in the performance is observed by using MIMO technique. This performance improvement is more prominent for more complex video as compared to less complex video. As for the limiting case BER of 10(-3) gives a limiting link distance of 1350 m; however with VQA metrics, the limiting case distance is 1280 m. By the use of 2 x 2 MIMO techniques, this distance enhances by 20-25 m.