ABSTRACT. ATSC 3.0 has been released – a next-gen broadcast TV system that allows broadcasters to provide new services to viewers. ATSC 3.0 provides a flexible and more efficient physical layer, mobility, Ultra-High Definition (UHD) images, new solutions for immersive and personalized audio, an all IP based transport system, hybrid broadcast/broadband services, advanced emergency alerting and incorporation of new user technologies such as interactivity.

This presentation will provide an overview of Next Gen TV from a viewpoint of what has been achieved – what kinds of new opportunities and services do broadcasters have to engage their viewers. It will also address some of the implementation considerations for broadcasters.

As we look to the future, we will find that the old paradigm of slowly changing technologies is probably over. Standards and technologies for broadcast television will need to become more nimble and adaptable – more like those for the Internet. This presentation will conclude with some thoughts on how to achieve that.

ABSTRACT. 5G broadband wireless system has recently become one of the hot research frontiers. In China, the big three Chinese telecos have committed to invest $200B over the next seven years to build the world’s largest 5G infrastructure. The ongoing research and development of Chinese next generation broadcasting system is taking seriously considerations on the possible convergence of the broadcasting and mobile broadband eco-systems. The next generation broadcasting system requirements in the 5G era shall include various new elements and features, such as IP-centric broadcast-broadband compatible frame structure, cooperative transmission cross networks, dynamic spectrum access, very high capacity and data rates, ubiquitous deep and reliable coverage, in-band low delay interactivity, etc. The next generation systems will not only be capable of providing efficient and cost effective services in modern urban population centers, but also delivering high quality and diversified state-of-the-art interactive media services to the general public in China’s vast rural areas to thousands and millions of countryside residence. The media broadcasting should be an element of the 5G eco-system, or as part of the 5G heterogeneous networks for the future connected society.

ABSTRACT. Over the last 25 years Standards Developing Organisations (SDO) like DVB have provided the necessary specification for the transition from analogue to digital TV. Analogue Switch Off has happened in many parts of the world. Now, with HD and UHD being specified as well, what will be the future roadmap for broadcast media technology and how can SDOs provide the technology for next generation broadcast?

ABSTRACT. Media applications are amongst the most demanding services requiring high amounts of network capacity as well as extremely low latency for synchronous audio-visual streaming in production quality. Recent technological advances in the 5G domain hold the promise to unlock the potential of the media industry by offering high quality media services through dynamic efficient resource allocation. Actual implementations are now required to validate whether advanced media applications can be realised benefiting from ultra-low latency, very-high bandwidth and flexible dynamic configuration offered by these new 5G networks. A truly integrated approach is needed that focuses on the media applications not only on the management of generic network functions and the orchestration of resources at the various radio, fronthaul/backhaul, edge and core network segments. The H2020 5G PPP Phase 2 project 5GMEDIA [1] leverages new options for more flexible, ad-hoc and cost-effective production workflows by replacing dedicated lines and hardware equipment with software functions (VNFs) facilitating (semi-) automated smart production in remote locations. Highly scalable virtualized media services deployed on or close to the edge reduce complexity for the user, ensure operational reliability and increase the Quality of Experience (QoE). Virtual compression engines have the potential to replace dedicated encoder/decoder hardware while the network optimisation (Cognitive Network Optimizer) in combination with the Quality of Service (QoS) monitoring helps to overcome the current internet best-effort principle and ensures that the required performance needs are met at all times.

ABSTRACT. Media applications are amongst the most demanding services in terms of resources, requiring huge network capacity for high bandwidth audio-visual and other mobile sensory streams. The 5G-MEDIA project aims at innovating mediarelated applications by investigating how these applications and the underlying 5G network should be coupled and interwork to the benefit of both. The 5G-MEDIA approach aims at delivering an integrated programmable service platform for the development, design and operations of media applications in 5G networks by providing mechanisms to flexibly adapt service operations to dynamic conditions and react upon events (e.g. to transparently accommodate auto-scaling of resources, VNF replacement, etc.). In this paper we present the 5G-MEDIA service platform architecture, which has been specifically designed to enable the development and operation of services for the nascent 5G media industry. Our approach delivers an integrated programmable service platform for the development, design and operations of media applications in 5G networks.

ABSTRACT. The success of streaming platforms and the expansion of advanced multimedia formats, such as UHD that presents 4K and 8K resolutions, demand better network conditions for transmitting higher amounts of data. 5G Networks offer a collection of improvements over their predecessors including an increase of bandwidth and lower latency. Additionally, 5G architecture allows the network nodes to improve their capabilities with the inclusion of Software-Defined Networking (SDN) and Network Function Virtualization (NFV) technologies, which provide an opportunity to control media flows and distribute the processing tools through the delocation of remote virtual machines. As a consequence of this fact, different types of applications for broadcast and multimedia analysis can be implemented for different purposes in the network distribution chain, such as image or audio assessment, video edition, metadata addition and other kinds of system processing. For this paper, among these applications, we present a software module that is able to assess video quality when applied in any point of the network in order to determine remotely the state of the network. This module known as "probe" checks the transmission through image evaluation metrics and sends a resulting report to the network backbone for communication the retransmission if necessary, to fulfill the requirements and demands of the users. Tests developed in different network distributions and with a variety of video sequences demonstrate the validity of this innovative software.

ABSTRACT. The upcoming 5G networks, among other technological advances, bring Network Function Virtualization (NFV) capabilities enabling deployment of application service intelligence on their Next Generation Core (NGC). Application specific logic is packaged into Virtual Network Functions (VNFs) so that their instantiation and deployment can be done at any node of the NGC, with their management and orchestration being maintained by the 5G infrastructure. While the number of instances of each VNF and their placement inside the NGC network are managed by the 5G infrastructure, such management cannot be optimal without application context. In this paper, we propose a 5G oriented system architecture for a next generation augmented virtuality tele-immersive two-player video game application. In the presented video game, the players compete in a capture the flag race in an innovative game movement control setting which uses motion capture technology to allow the players to interact with the game via their body posture and hand gestures. On the top of this, real-time 3D-Reconstruction technology is utilized to create 3D avatars of the players and embed them inside the game environment. Apart from the players, the application also supports real-time spectating of the game action by a considerable amount of spectators that join the live game via client software designed for desktop PCs, smartphones and tablets, connected through mobile or fixed access networks. To distribute the 3D traffic to such a number of consumers that have different device capabilities and are located at varying geographical locations while offering the highest possible Quality of Experience (QoE), is a challenging task. One of the contemporary ways to address this problem is via adaptive streaming. To realize this concept, real-time 3D-Media Transcoders need to be employed. The proposed system architecture considers packaging the aforementioned 3D-Media Transcoders as VNFs that can be deployed on 5G infrastructure. In the paper, it is shown that such an architecture can decrease costs for a given level of offered QoE, with evident benefits for the game service's shareholders. While the application type presented in this paper is fixed, the proposed system architecture can be adopted by other applications of similar context with similar benefits gained from the flexible deployment of virtualised applications in 5G networks.

ABSTRACT. To meet the rapidly increasing demand for commercial broadband wireless services, layered division multiplexing (LDM) was proposed for the next generation digital TV (DTV) standard. By non-orthogonally superimposing several services with different data rates, LDM can provide better spectral efficiency (SE) and more robust performance compared to some traditional orthogonal division multiplexing schemes. In this paper, the achievable SE of a two-layer LDM system is analyzed via its mutual information (MI). Because the MI lacks a closed-form formulation, we verify it through the Monte Carlo (MC) simulation and propose its calculable lower bound to avoid the huge computational complexity. Simulation results confirm our SE analysis and proposed lower bound of the system’s MI.

ABSTRACT. Local Service Insertion (LSI) on Single Frequency Networks (SFN) is an attractive business case for broadcasters. Nevertheless, its practical implementation imposes a technical challenge from the spectral efficiency point of view, which has not been fully overcome yet. Recently, Layered Division Multiplexing (LDM) has been proposed as a solution to face this problem. LDM is one of the tools included in the ATSC 3.0 physical layer that enables an efficient multiple service delivery, making a simultaneous use of the whole time and frequency resources. Under certain configurations, LDM is a potential enabler for the LSI contents delivery, conveying the regional and local services on different layers. In this approach, the complexity and performance of the channel estimation procedures represent a key factor for the commercial success of receivers. Therefore, the main objective is to evaluate the the existing channel estimation procedures in a fully compliant ATSC 3.0 simulation set-up for the LDM-LSI scenario.

ABSTRACT.  The scheme that combines LDM(Layered Division Multiplexing) to the FDM(Frequency Division Multiplexing) scheme based BST-OFDM(Band Segmented Transmission – Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing) in Japan is proposed for the next DTTB(Digital Terrestrial Television Broadcasting). In this paper, the transmission symbols for the stationary reception are generated by puncturing the symbols after BICM(Bit-Interleaved Coded Modulation) and removed symbols by puncturing are multiplexed to the transmitted symbols for mobile reception by LDM. The performances of the proposed scheme are evaluated by computer simulations under the multipath environment, and the improvement of the required CNR(Carrier to Noise Ratio) in stationary reception was confirmed. 

ABSTRACT. This paper presents performance results of commercial ISDB-TB receivers with the ISDB-TB LDM in Core Layer. The Core Layer is fully compatible with ISDB-TB and is multiplexed with the Enhanced Layer. Simulation results of the Enhanced Layer using a powerful channel coder with modulation up to 256-QNUC and Non-Uniform Constellation are presented. The ISDB-TB LDM can improve the spectral efficiency and useful bit rate so that it becomes possible to use it in the transition for UHDTV applications. The Enhanced Layer uses the same BICM of ATSC 3.0, with LDPC encoder concatenated with the BCH. The implementation was done using the GNU Radio Companion software and Software Defined Radio. The Maximal Ratio Combining technique was proposed to increase the robustness of the system. This solution is an alternative way to introduce a new digital terrestrial broadcasting system using the same channel and infrastructure.

ABSTRACT. In this paper, we study the user pairing in downlink non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) networks. Users are divided into multiple 2-user clusters. In each cluster, the two users share the same transmit source, like time slot and spectrum, and the base station (BS) distributes the total transmit power to them. The performance of NOMA depends greatly on how we group them and how the power is allocated. Here we propose two user pairing algorithms based on neighbor search, specifically the hill climbing and simulated annealing. Different from most existing methods, they don’t have to work jointly with a certain power allocation scheme. Moreover, simulation results show that they significantly reduce the complexity compared with exhaustive search and can achieve a near-optimal solution.

ABSTRACT. This paper presents the results of subjective quality tests conducted at TDF, France, in late 2017. This study aims at showing the relevance of a DTT technology switchover in the French market. Both HDTV and UHDTV are compared, under realistic DTT constraints regarding viewing environment and targeted bitrates. From experimental results, it statistically appears that UHDTV with HDR features can brings significant quality improvement over HDTV

ABSTRACT. This article presents an application developed to automate subjective quality video assessments, in 4K and lower resolutions. It supports different subjective tests methods, including five-grade Absolute Category Rating (ACR), nine-grade ACR and Continuous Category Rating (CCR). The developed application is openly available for academic and research purposes, upon request to the authors.

ABSTRACT. We verified the image impression enhancement effect due to the introduction of HDR and WCG through a subjective evaluation test. The results indicate that the two factors work additively for impression enhancement and HDR appears to be the dominant factor.

ABSTRACT. With the advancement of video coding, network technologies and display devices, there appears greater demands for video quality assessment. The pursuit of higher coding efficiency promotes the development of codecs. H.264/AVC standard is the mainstream of video coding standards these days and will not be completely replaced in the near further. Meanwhile，H.265/High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) has been promoted by the Joint Collaborative Team on Video Coding (JCT-VC) to achieve higher coding efficiency, and it will own broader prospects in Ultra-High Definition (UHD) video services. H.264/AVC and H.265/HEVC will co-exist, making it crucial to build a reliable VQA model to support both standards at the same time. In this paper, we propose a no reference bitstream-based VQA model that has the compatibility of both H.264/AVC and H.265/HEVC. The proposed model is based on the coding parameters, as well as the display parameters to make it more generalized in diverse terminal display scenarios. The proposed model was validated for both standards using subjective H.264/AVC database and large-scale HEVC database, demonstrating great performance and outperforming other compared models.

ABSTRACT. One of the goals of future TV broadcast services is to provide realistic media contents to the users. The user’s sense of reality can be reinforced by adding to conventional media multiple sensorial effects, through five-sense stimulus (i.e., taste, sight, touch, smell, and hearing). In a smart home environment, to deliver the additional effects, customary devices (e.g., air conditioning, lights, etc.), provided of opportune smart features, have to be preferred to ad-hoc devices, often deployed in other applications as for example in gaming systems. In this context, a key issue is the interconnection among the TV and the customary devices that deliver the additional sensorial effects to the user. In such a framework, home customary devices play a role to implement additional effects to the conventional broadcast TV service. In this study, a prototype is implemented for broadcasting multi sensorial media in a real smart home scenario. Real customary devices are deployed. A subjective test measurement campaign based on mean opinion score was performed to assess the Quality of Experience of the users and the feasibility of the proposed multi sensorial media TV service.

ABSTRACT. Scalability, distributivity, interoperability and modularity introduced in cloud computing have deeply changed the legacy data center's architecture, implementation and processing capabilities. The atomic network services offered by cloud architectures are called microservices. Unlike virtual machines, microservices can be implemented in the form of low resources footprint applications as containers (Docker, LXC etc.) or even smaller as unikernels (IncludeOS, ClickOS, Rumprun, HermitOS etc.). The need to efficiently offload the processing of computation-intensive applications has motivated the introduction of Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGA) boards in servers. FPGAs can nowadays be considered as cloud-standard processing resources. However, in today's cloud data centers, FPGAs cannot be accessed to run concurrent microservices. This severely limits the efficient deployment of microservices. This paper aims at introducing an FPGA-based system for the concurrent acceleration of cloud-native microservices onto FPGAs.

ABSTRACT. The evolution of the centralized cloud computing architecture towards the edge of the network, driven by virtualization technologies such as Software-Defined Networking (SDN), Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) and Multi-access Edge Computing (MEC), brings new opportunities to the multimedia industry. Offloading computing power to the edge, local caching, minimized latency and flexibility in the deployment of services are only some of the benefits that the multimedia can gain from utilizing the edge computing capabilities. To achieve such progress the potential elements of an edge computing framework have to be studied and evaluated. In this work, we focus on the component managing the edge resources which is defined as the Virtual Infrastructure Manager (VIM) in the MEC reference architecture. We analyze the time overhead which virtual machines (VMs) provisioning brings into the system. This is done by a comparison of two popular open-source VIM solutions, OpenStack and OpenVIM. We discuss and compare the logical architectures of the two VIMs and present the results of their performance evaluation. We extended the open-source cloud benchmarking framework CloudBench by adding a new cloud adapter for OpenVIM and used it to gather the cloud management metrics.

ABSTRACT. Network operators are actively pushing towards the new 5G era and a crucial part to accomplish this is the Network Functions Virtualization (NFV). FPGAs and their hardware accelerators are a promising solution for NFV and 5G cloud environments because of their fast turnaround time and great speedup potential through application parallelism mapping on the reconfigurable fabric. Recently, consolidation reached a plateau in this field with lightweight virtualization techniques, that require a high overcommitment of FPGA accelerator resources to cope with numerous demands of guests. Although FPGAs can play an important role for the future 5G networks their capability to manage and control them from the upper layers of the software stack is inadequate. The lack of such support coupled with cloud integration and programmability issues can repel potential providers from utilizing FPGAs at their data centers. This paper presents the communication mechanism of the vFPGAmanager, an FPGA virtualization framework which can be orchestrated, monitored and enables accelerators overcommitment with direct guest access. These are key features to allow potential adopters of FPGA technology to include them in the next generation of NFV systems. The communication mechanism architecture is detailed and then benchmarked to show that even under heavy load on the system it demonstrates a minimal overhead to orchestrate and monitor the FPGA as a resource.

ABSTRACT. The 5G advent is stimulating research and development of new solutions and tools to serve the Media & Entertainment industry in order to cope with all the demanding requirements for very high volume (downlink and uplink), for service fruition across multiple devices, for anytime and anywhere coverage, for Quality of Service and security. In this paper, we focus on scenarios and requirements to implement orchestrated virtual CDNs in 5G networks used to distribute ultra-high-definition media contents. This work originates from the research activities within the H2020 5GMEDIA project, in which We are designing a solution across the edge Point of Presence (PoP) and core data-centers of an operator network, to allow the distribution of UHD media contents from central production centers to end users. Our vCDN solution can elastically cross various anchor points for fixed and/or mobile broadband services down till personal devices, both fixed and mobile to properly serve users attached to the 5G network. The work reports on results of our initial design phases and focuses on the specific scenarios and requirements in our scope. The implementation of the designed virtual CDN solution powered by the 5G-MEDIA management and orchestration platform is an ongoing task, which – once completed - will allow us to validate the proposed scenarios and service orchestration approaches through the 5G-MEDIA in the project testbeds.

ABSTRACT. The massive consumption of media contents needs of network accelerators, which boost the media delivery and optimize the traffic volume crossing the network from servers to media players. Content Delivery Network (CDN) is the common network function to distribute in a cloud-manner the contents, enhancing media availability and distribution performance. However, high concurrency rates of media sessions can produce CDN performance degradations and outages that impact negatively the Quality of Experience (QoE). 5G Multi-access Edge Computing (MEC) architecture envisions a QoE-aware system at the network edge which performs analytics to enhance or boost media services. This paper provides a novel MEC proxy to expand and enforce caching infrastructures for efficient and reliable content distribution. First, the proxy caches contents on the network edge to reduce the Capital Expenditure (CAPEX) of the CDN for the OTT service provider. To this end, the proxy is able to identify recurrent requests. Second, the proxy shields from identified or predicted CDN malfunction. Here, the proxy switches the download sessions to an alternative CDN in order to ensure QoE rates, enabling a CDN dynamic selection based on live connectivity statistics. The proposed solution is evaluated by delivering Dynamic Adaptive Streaming over HTTP (MPEG-DASH) streams in a dense client cell while applying different caching strategies.

ABSTRACT. A terrestrial broadcasting system using wideband transmission and reuse factor 1 employing power splitting is described. Wideband transmission employs robust low-order constellations in potentially the whole of the UHF band. In contrast to traditional terrestrial transmission with high-order constellations in up to 8 MHz bands, this enables a particular power efficient transmission at the same or even larger capacity. Implicit in the network design based on a reuse factor 1 is the creation of interference between transmitters at any given receiver within the network. A receiver is thus required to perform interference cancellation techniques to acquire the desired data. Power splitting, its design and the corresponding iterative receiver are described as practical means for achieving certain operating points on the boundary of the capacity region of wideband broadcasting systems and support is given by network and physical layer simulations.

ABSTRACT. Broadcasting networks are an efficient means for delivering media content to a high density of users, because their operational cost is almost independent of the size of their audience for a given coverage area. However, when the propagation conditions are better than the worst-case design, the energy efficiency is suboptimal. In this paper, we present the results of a trial to emulate the performance of a dynamic broadcasting network with adaptive radiated power in a real broadcasting scenario. We assess the radiated power of the broadcasting network in a Cuban environment by means of a monitoring device. The power consumption of the dynamic broadcasting network with adaptive radiated power is assessed and compared with traditional broadcasting for different implementation margins. To emulate the performance of the dynamic broadcasting network with adaptive radiated power, we consider a commercial Digital Terrestrial Multimedia Broadcast (DTMB) transmitter in Havana, Cuba. Testbed hardware is designed and developed to measure the fading with a commercial receiver and emulate the signal reception under adaptive power conditions. The dynamic broadcasting network performance is assessed following the general guidelines and techniques for the evaluation of digital terrestrial television broadcasting systems recommended in the ITU-R BT.2035-2 report.

ABSTRACT. The demand on linear services like mobile TV has been growing during the last few years, creating challenges to the conventional methods of delivery such as broadcast networks and broadband mobile networks. In this paper, a hybrid approach with the coexistence of a broadcast transmitter and a unicast broadband transmitter is discussed, and the problem of the power consumption and power efficiency is interpreted. To achieve an efficient hybrid network in terms of power consumed to serve a user, the hybrid network is numerically optimized in terms of key design parameters like the broadcast radius and the base stations' density. The effect of user density is also studied highlighting the gain expected when using the hybrid approach. Results have shown that an optimal operation point could be found, and that the gain provided by the hybrid network depends on the density of the users.

ABSTRACT. Faster-than-Nyquist (FTN) signaling is capable of improving the spectral efficiency by offering a higher information rate, while preserving the signaling bandwidth. In this paper, preceding the FTN modulation, a precoding based data spreading is utilized to introduce an artificial interference, which in the frequency domain shapes the signal spectrum and compresses the transmission bandwidth. In this scheme, the spectral efficiency is improved in both time and frequency domains. Further, we optimize the precoder by maximizing the ultimate system capacity and by maximizing the minimum Euclidean distance between the modulated symbols. The spectrum mask limitations are also considered for an imposed constraint on the optimization. Simulation results demonstrate that the 16-ary quadrature amplitude modulation (16-QAM) signaling can achieve the same spectral efficiency as the 64, 256-QAM Nyquist signaling, while the signal-to-noise ratio gains are about 2.5 dB and 5 dB, respectively. Furthermore, the proposed scheme outperforms the existing FTN system in terms of energy performance, noise immunity and boosts the achievable capacity limit of the system subject to the mask.

ABSTRACT. The paper presents a prototypical realization and performance results for a DASH low latency live distribution system. The concept is based on multi-fragment segments and HTTP chunked delivery. A DASH server makes fractions of a segment, called here fragments, available before the full segment is encoded and packaged. A client can retrieve available fragments using HTTP chunked delivery, thus reducing packaging, distribution and playout latencies. The implementation focuses on the usage of HTML5 browser-based players (using the Media Source Extension) and on the separation of the DASH packager and HTTP origin. Both functionalities are widely used in today’s video service realizations. Different from earlier works, our paper evaluates the system distribution latency in real deployments and provides measurements and simulation results which illustrate the latency reductions.

ABSTRACT. DASH broadcast is a recent topic and many standardization bodies are incorporating it. This work provides optimizations for the key metrics that determine the QoE for ATSC 3.0 object-based broadcast: the end-to-end latency, tune-in delay, and channel change times. The system employs DASH broadcast over IP-based ROUTE protocol. The performance of different encoding schemes is compared and encoding-dependent end-to-end latency is evaluated. The receiver-end optimization for tune-in delay exploiting hybrid capability of DASH/ROUTE system is proposed. The quantitative results demonstrate the performance enhancements achieved.

ABSTRACT. This paper proposes a video quality adaptation algorithm based on the Dynamic Adaptive Streaming over HTTP (DASH) standard for on-demand video services. When a video is encoded with constant quality, the resulting bitstream has variable bitrate due to the inherent nature of the video encoding process. The proposed algorithm, called Look Ahead, takes into account this bitrate variability in order to calculate, on the fly, the appropriate quality level that minimizes the number of interruptions during the playback. Moreover, the Look Ahead algorithm has been implemented and integrated into ExoPlayer v2, the latest version of the library developed by Google to play DASH contents. The proposed algorithm is compared to the Müller and Segment Aware Rate Adaptation (SARA) algorithms as well as to the adaptive algorithm integrated into ExoPlayer. The comparison reflects that Look Ahead outperforms the Müller, SARA and the ExoPlayer adaptive algorithms in terms of number and duration of video playback stalls, with hardly decreasing the average video quality.

ABSTRACT. Enhanced TV (enTV) features introduced into Long Term Evolution (LTE) Evolved Multimedia Broadcast/Multicast Service (eMBMS) have attracted TV broadcasters to offer their services also over eMBMS to enable service continuity and greater coverage. Considering the usual service quality offered by these content providers, an important question becomes how to deliver the offered services also over eMBMS while achieving an acceptable level of quality. In this paper, the results of an investigation that was performed for ATSC 3.0 Dynamic Adaptive Streaming over HTTP (DASH) TV broadcasting service are reported. While adequate service quality was achieved through LTE carrier aggregation (CA), additional error robustness schemes, and a flexible service configuration framework, crucial input for 5G design considerations, are derived.