MING-T: Multistandard Integrated Network Convergence for Global Mobile and Broadcast Technologies

Staff: Xiaoming Fu, Dieter Hogrefe, Ingo Juchem, Xiaodong Yang
Project Partners: University of Hamburg, University of Goettingen, Create-Net, Frontier Silicon, ENENSYS Technologies, Siemens Networks China, Tsinghua University, Beijing University of Post and Telecommunications, China Telecom.

As we move towards an era of widespread information availability, an effective system of convergence among the new broadcasting technologies, Internet technology, and mobile systems becomes increasingly important. Countries are deploying multiple broadcast technologies; it will remain a key challenge for the industry and user communities to provide a uniform platform to content providers, and convergence is critical to overcoming this challenge. The goal of this EU FP6 IST Specific Targeted Research Project (STREP) is to research, develop, prototype, integrate and validate the interoperability and handover issues of the representative mobile digital broadcast standards developed in China and Europe.

---

The two-year international cooperation project Multistandard Integrated Network Convergence for Global Mobile and Broadcast Technologies (MING?T) project will address the issues of convergence between broadcast standards and mobile communications network technologies.

A further goal of the project is to foster cooperation between Europe and China in both industry and research communities. The project will particularly address the convergence of the European Digital Video Broadcasting - Handheld (DVB-H) standard with the emerging Chinese standard Digital Terresrial Multimedia Broadcasting (DTMB) with a view to providing a harmonized framework.

In addition the project will consider the convergence between broadcast and mobile technology networks to provide a unified platform for the delivery of services to mobile terminals.

Finally, the project will cover how to deliver these services with a consistent level of quality to rich media applications across mixed broadcast networks, and in particular on how scalable video coding may address this issue.

Main project objectives:

1. Develop an architecture that can provide seamless access in converged digital broadcasting and mobile communications networks.
2. Incorporate Chinese DTMB into the multi-standard framework.
3. Apply advanced scalable coding techniques for the services in the converged digital broadcasting and mobile communications networks environment.
4. Conduct field trials to provide validation support for the usability of the developed technologies.

References

Publications of this project:

2006

A Survey of Handover Algorithms in DVB-H, Xiaodong Yang, Jani Väre and Thomas J. Owens, IEEE Communications Surveys & Tutorials, December 2006.

Incorporating digital repeaters into the soft handover standard in digital video broadcasting for handhelds, Xiaodong Yang, Yong-Hua Song, Thomas J. Owens, John Cosmas, and Takebumi Itagaki, International Journal of Services and Standards, 2(3): 238 - 256, InderScience Publishers, ISSN 1740-8849, June 2006.
Read abstract