![](bg2.png)
Research and Development projects in the 5th European Framework Programme. The
ultimate goal of these projects was to provide new affordable services to the users,
fulfilling two observed tendencies: i) the personalisation of services, that cannot be
offered by traditional one-to-many broadcasting networks, and ii) the consumption of
bandwidth hungry multimedia services that cannot be offered by existing
communication networks especially on the move. The objective of further
development of the subject of Interactive Broadcasting was confronted by the
European commission in a lately organised workshop that identified the technological
and service issues which require further R&D including: i) video and audio delivery
to mobile terminals, ii) traffic symmetry/asymmetry, iii) market prospects of the
introduction of new services and applications, vi) regulatory and spectrum issues, and
finally, and most predominant, the need of synergy (better than convergence) between
broadcasters and telecom operators towards the introduction of the next generation
networks (NGN).
In Sevilla European Council [1] Europe expressed its current interest for next
generation networks by defining the actions-to-be-taken and by identifying the issues
to be studied in depth (and in parallel) prior to the deployment of NGN. Two of these
issues are (as they appear in the Sevilla document) the “Digital Switchover” (i.e. the
transition from analogue to digital broadcasting), and the “Broadband access for all
citizens”.
Accomplishment of Europe’s vision for the next generation networks requires,
however, extensive study and in depth examination of the digital switchover and the
broadband access for all issues. Currently, there is no clear point that such action have
been taken, neither by the interesting sectors (broadcasting and telecommunication),
nor by the political and governmental authorities [2], [3], [4]. Major barriers are the
political authorities’ unawareness about the potentialities and advantages of the new
technologies, and the clashes between the broadcasting and telecommunication
sectors in the market field.
Realising the networking capabilities of the new digital television in UHF (DVB-T),
and the importance of broadband access technologies in the Information Society, this
paper presents and draws-up the routes towards a successful deployment of NGN, by
elaborating on the relation between “Digital Switchover” and the “Broadband Access
for all” issues. It proposes the use of the DVB-T stream in regenerative configurations
for the creation of a powerful backbone that interconnects distribution nodes within a
city. As these distribution nodes (local networks) make use of broadband access
technologies (i.e.WLAN, LMDS, MMDS, Optical) they enable all citizens to have
broadband access to the entire network and to be interconnected. Such a configuration
enables for multi-service capability, as the regenerative DVB-T creates a single
access network physical infrastructure, shared by multiple services (i.e. TV
programmes, interactive multimedia services, Internet applications, etc.).
Following this introductory section, the rest of this paper is structures as follows:
Section 2, presents the overall architecture of the proposed infrastructure, Sections 3
and 4 describe its functional components (regenerative DVB-T and Cell Main Nodes),
while Section 5 presents the principles of a real time dynamic bandwidth management
system (DBMS), required for optimised spectrum usage. Finally, Section 6 concludes
the paper.
30