DVB-C

List of digital television broadcast standards

DVB standards (Europe)

DVB-S (satellite) DVB-S2

DVB-T (terrestrial) DVB-T2

DVB-C (cable) DVB-C2

DVB-H (handheld) DVB-SH (satellite)

ATSC standards (North America/Korea)

ATSC (terrestrial/cable)

ATSC-M/H (mobile/handheld)

ISDB standards (Japan/Latin America)

ISDB-S (satellite)

ISDB-T (terrestrial) 1seg (handheld)

ISDB-C (cable)

SBTVD/ISDB-Tb (Brazil)

DTMB standards (China)

DTMB-T/H (terrestrial/handheld)

CMMB (handheld)

DMB standards (Korean handheld)

T-DMB (terrestrial)

S-DMB (satellite)

MediaFLO

Codecs

Video MPEG-2 H.264/MPEG-4 AVC AVS

Audio MP2 MP3 AC-3 AAC HE-AAC

Frequency bands

VHF

UHF

SHF

v · d · e

DVB-C stands for Digital Video Broadcasting - Cable and it is the DVB European consortium standard for the broadcast transmission of digital television over cable. This system transmits an MPEG-2 or MPEG-4 family digital audio/digital video stream, using a QAM modulation with channel coding.

DVB-C2

On February 18, 2008 it was announced that a new standard – DVB-C2 – would be developed during 2008, and a "Call for Technologies" was issued.^[1] Proposals including simulation programs and information on patent rights could be submitted until June 16, 2008.

"The results of the DVB-C2 Study Mission already provided clear indications that technologies are available allowing the performance of the second generation DVB cable transmission system to get so close to the theoretical Shannon Limit that any further improvements in the future would most likely not be able to justify the introduction of a disruptive third generation of cable transmission system." (DVB-C2 CfT)

By using state of the art coding and modulation techniques, DVB-C2 should offer greater than 30% higher spectrum efficiency under the same conditions, and the gains in downstream channel capacity will be greater than 60% for optimized HFC networks.

The final DVB-C2 specification was approved by the DVB Steering Board in April 2009.^[2]

DVB-C2 allows bitrates up to 83.1 Mbit/s on a 8 MHz channel bandwidth when using 4096-QAM modulation; future extensions will allow up to 97 Mbit/s and 110.8 Mbit/s per channel using 16384-QAM and 65536-AQAM modulation.^[3]

Modes and features of DVB-C2 in comparison to DVB-C:^[2]

	DVB-C	DVB-C2
Input Interface	Single Transport Stream (TS)	Multiple Transport Stream and Generic Stream Encapsulation (GSE)
Modes	Constant Coding & Modulation	Variable Coding & Modulation and Adaptive Coding & Modulation
FEC	Reed Solomon (RS)	LDPC + BCH
Interleaving	Bit-Interleaving	Bit- Time- and Frequency-Interleaving
Modulation	Single Carrier QAM	COFDM
Pilots	Not Applicable	Scattered and Continual Pilots
Guard Interval	Not Applicable	1/64 or 1/128
Modulation Schemes	16- to 256-QAM	16- to 4096-QAM

Technical description of the DVB-C transmitter

Scheme of a DVB-C transmission system

With reference to the figure, a short description of the single processing blocks follows.

• Source coding and MPEG-2 multiplexing (MUX): video, audio, and data streams are multiplexed into an MPEG program stream (MPEG-PS). One or more MPEG-PSs are joined together into an MPEG transport stream (MPEG-TS). This is the basic digital stream which is being transmitted and received by home set top boxes (STB). Allowed bitrates for the transported MPEG-2 depend on a number of modulation parameters: it can range from about 6 to about 64 Mbit/s (see the bottom figure for a complete listing).
• MUX adaptation and energy dispersal: the MPEG-TS is identified as a sequence of data packets, of fixed length (188 bytes). With a technique called energy dispersal, the byte sequence is decorrelated.
• External encoder: a first level of protection is applied to the transmitted data, using a nonbinary block code, a Reed-Solomon RS (204, 188) code, allowing the correction of up to a maximum of 8 wrong bytes for each 188-byte packet.
• External interleaver: convolutional interleaving is used to rearrange the transmitted data sequence, such way it becomes more rugged to long sequences of errors.
• Byte/m-tuple conversion: data bytes are encoded into bit m-tuples (m = 4, 5, 6, 7, or 8).
• Differential coding: In order to get a rotation-invariant constellation, this unit shall apply a differential encoding of the two Most Significant Bits (MSBs) of each symbol.
• QAM Mapper: the bit sequence is mapped into a base-band digital sequence of complex symbols. There are 5 allowed modulation modes: 16-QAM, 32-QAM, 64-QAM, 128-QAM, 256-QAM.
• Base-band shaping: the QAM signal is filtered with a raised-cosine shaped filter, in order to remove mutual signal interference at the receiving side.
• DAC and front-end: the digital signal is transformed into an analog signal, with a digital-to-analog converter (DAC), and then modulated to radio frequency by the RF front-end.

Available bitrates for a DVB-C system

Modulation	Bandwidth (MHz)
	2	4	5	8	10
16QAM	6,41	12,82	19,23	25,64	32,05
32QAM	8,01	16,03	24,04	32,05	40,07
64QAM	9,92	19,23	28,85	38,47	48,08
128QAM	11,22	22,44	33,66	44,88	56,10
256QAM	12,82	25,64	38,47	51,29	64,11

Technical description of the receiver

The receiving STB adopts techniques which are dual to those ones used in the transmission.

• Front-end and ADC: the analog RF signal is converted to base-band and transformed into a digital signal, using an analog-to-digital converter (ADC).

• QAM Demodulation
• Equalization
• Differential decoding
• Outer deinterleaving
• Outer decoding
• MUX adaptation
• MPEG-2 demultiplexing and source decoding
• Programmable Transport Stream

Countries that use DVB-C

•  Australia (Foxtel)
• Bosnia and Herzegovina (ViNet)
•  Belgium
•  Bulgaria
•  Croatia (B.net)
•  Czech Republic (UPC)
•  Denmark
•  Estonia
•  France
•  Finland
•  Germany
•  Hungary (Digi TV Hungary)
•  Indonesia
•  India
•  Ireland (UPC Ireland)
•  Israel
•  Luxembourg
•  Lithuania
•  Macedonia
•  Nepal
•  Netherlands
•  New Zealand (TelstraClear)
•  Norway (GET)
•  Poland
•  Portugal
•  Romania (RCS, UPC)
•  Russia
•  Serbia (SBB, IKOM, Radijus Vektor)
•  Slovakia
•  Slovenia
•  Spain
•  Sri Lanka
•  Sweden
•  Switzerland
•  Turkey (Teledünya)
•  United Kingdom (Virgin Media)
  • Isle of Wight (WightCable)
•  Ukraine (Volia, Triolan)

See also

• ATSC Standards
• Digital cable
• Digital Video Broadcasting (DVB)
• DMB (Digital Multimedia Broadcasting)
• Digital television (DTV)
• Redesign project, project set up by cable operators, equipment manufacturers, and research organisations

References

1. ^ DVB-C2 Call for Technology
2. ^ ^{a b} "2nd Generation Cable: The world’s most advanced Digital Cable TV system". DVB. http://www.docstoc.com/docs/39387067/2nd-Generation-Cable. Retrieved 2010-11-09. 
3. ^ Dr. Dirk Jaeger, (2010-09-02). "DVB-C2 Gets Reality - Facts and Figures on a New Transmission Approach.". 8th Broadband Technology Conference, Gdynia. ReDeSign Project. http://www.ict-redesign.eu/index.php?id=27. 

• ETSI Standard: ETSI EN 300 429 V1.2.1 (1998-04), Digital Video Broadcasting (DVB); Framing structure, channel coding and modulation for cable systems, download from ETSI.

External links

• Website of the DVB Project
• DVB-C2 Webpage
• DVB-C2, 2nd Generation Cable DVB Fact Sheet - September 2010]
• DVB-C2 IP-Core for forward error correction