Introduction

The communication world is evolving quickly with new technologies being continuously developed. In the telecommunication world, UMTS is a 3G standard for end-to-end mobile systems utilizing Wideband Code Division Multiple Access (WCDMA) access technology. In the broadcast world, Digital Video Broadcasting - Terrestrial (DVB-T) is a leading international standard established for the move from analogue to digital broadcasting basically via terrestrial networks. Within DVB-T, it is possible to carry defined data containers in addition to the audio and video in the Motion Picture Experts Group Technical Standard-2 (MPEG-2) transport stream. These data containers can be used to realize new data services or to carry IP datagrams. Thus it enables large amounts of data to be delivered to a lot of users in both fixed and mobile environments.

A terrestrial broadcasting channel differs from a satellite transmission link or a cable channel in that it is prone to multipath propagation. Reflections of the transmitted signal from obstacles such as buildings or mountains are superimposed asynchronously on the directly received signal. The OFDM modulation scheme was introduced to DVB standards to utilize the multipath effects to generate stronger signals instead of generating inferences. The performance of the OFDM scheme in DVB-T is analysed in [107].

DVB-H (formerly “DVB-X” [7]) together with DVB-T were developed by the DVB Project [51]. DVB-H targets handheld mobile terminals [108, 9]. As the multi-frequency cellular structured DVB-H network is a typical network structure, handover becomes a critical issue for DVB-H. Handover in DVB-H refers to the synchronization of the transport stream and the frequency when the terminal moves from one cell to another.