10.1 Introduction

The introduction of digital transmission technology enables a dramatic decrease in required bandwidth per channel. In the context of television services this implies that more television channels will be available to provide the home user with programs and special services. Services such as pay-per-view and video-on-demand, for example, require a large number of television channels. Because of the increased number of available channels it is expected that the costs per channel will drop. However, this depends on the investments that have to be made to enable the actual implementation of the digital transmission technology. Standards can play an important role in the establishment of economies of scale in order to obtain a return on investment.

This chapter discusses the DVB specifications for digital transmission technology, which were standardized by ETSI. DVB has specified several systems for digital communications via satellite, CATV, and terrestrial networks. The basic elements and the several (sub)systems pass the revue per communication system. Moreover, the channel encoding and decoding processes are explained at a functional level. The presence of additive white gaussian noise (AWGN) is assumed for each channel, unless stated otherwise. Information concerning the system performance can be obtained from the ETSI standards papers. Consult ^[1] for a more detailed study of the main DVB digital transmission systems.