The quality of data services over digital broadcast radio

There are a number of competing digital broadcast radio standards in existence today. These were primarily developed to provide a number of either audio only, or audio-visual services across a substantial geographical area. Since their conception, all of the digital broadcast standards have been able to transmit other kinds of data, known as data services, alongside audio and audio-visual data. The ability of audio and video codecs to cope with reception affected by error tends to be much higher than other kinds of digital data. As these standards were primarily developed to be carriers of audio or audio-visual data, the error protection for all of the digital broadcast radio standards was designed to be suitable for the contemporary audio-visual codec; typically the worst expected Bit Error Rate (BER), after the error protection, is 10-4. This protection is not strong enough for data that is intolerant of error. This research analyses and compares the performance of data services sent on Digital Audio Broadcast (DAB) and Digital Video Broadcast–Hand-held (DVB–h) channels. [Continues.]