Book Description

The broadcast/cellular cooperation for a common delivery of Mobile TV is at the heart of the emerging mobile broadcast technologies, namely the mobile extension of the second generation digital video broadcasting for terrestrial reception (DVB-T2 Lite) and its follower DVB-Next Generation Handheld (DVB-NGH). These broadcast technologies aim to cooperate with the Long Term Evolution (LTE), as the latter is intended to be the bearer of Mobile TV thanks to its enhanced-Multimedia Broadcast and Multicast Service feature (e-MBMS). Even though the 3GPP/DVB cooperation is not a new topic and was investigated with the introduction of the previous DVB technology, known as DVB-Handheld (DVB-H), most of the works addressing this issue considered a common service area covered by both DVB and cellular systems and focused solely on the impact of such cooperation in terms of capacity gains brought by 3GPP and error repair gains brought by DVB. This strategy was judged to be expensive since a new and very dense DVB network was needed. In order to overcome this problem and decrease as much as possible the need for a new broadcast network, we propose in this thesis a hybrid DVB/LTE network with a coverage extension strategy, where the LTE system, planned for almost a universal coverage, is used to deliver Mobile TV in areas not covered by recent DVB-T2 Lite (or eventually DVB-NGH) network. In this context, we explore two main issues:1. Mobile TV services have to share LTE resources with other higher priority services such as voice traffic. The dynamicity of the latter will impact the Quality of Service (QoS) of Mobile TV. We propose a new QoS-based planning for the hybrid DVB/LTE so as to guarantee an acceptable watching experience without over-dimensioning the LTE system. We derive using Markov chain analysis and hitting time theory, several QoS metrics pertaining to mobile TV performance, such as interruption frequency and duration.2. A new business model which clarifies the relationships between the different actors of the ecosystem namely DVB and LTE operators as well as the TV channel providers and constructs the service area from an economic point of view is needed. In fact, the absence of a clear and viable economic model that resolves the monetary conflicts between cellular and broadcast operators was one of the main drawbacks behind the failure of the first attempt of mobile TV delivery by cooperating UMTS/DVB-H. We develop in this thesis a profit sharing strategy for the cooperative network, using coalition game concept Shapley value and Nash equilibrium for a self-enforcing strategy. We further develop a new framework using real option theory coupled with coalition games for investment decision in mobile TV networks (whether an operator should enter the mobile TV market and, if yes, when to do so) and show how operators can incorporate the uncertainties related to demand and network operation costs. We propose a bi-level dynamic programming algorithm to solve numerically the developed real option game.