ABSTRACT
This chapter investigates the suitability of Multi-Protocol Encapsulation–Forward Error Correction (MPE-FEC) to combat against difficult channel conditions caused by mobility of the receiver. It discusses the orthogonality between the subcarriers in an orthogonal frequency division multiplexing system and shows that MPE-FEC alleviates problems caused by the Doppler spread. The MPE-FEC decoding method is left open by the standard for each receiver manufacturer to decide. The chapter provides a brief description of the Digital video broadcasting–handheld (DVB-H) system and analyses the performance of the DVB-H link layer FEC. MPE-FEC decoding procedures can differ from each other by the source and utilization of erasure information, with basic Reed–Solomon decoding algorithms remaining traditional. The MPE-FEC decoder can correct as many erasures, that is, unreliable bytes, on each row of the MPE-FEC frame as the number of transmitted redundancy columns. Decoding is performed row-wise to the received MPE-FEC frame, so that each row is treated as its own codeword.
