I would like to once again express my concern and support for all the members of the IEEE Broadcast Technology Society (BTS) community and others affected by the ongoing global health crisis. The health and safety of the members of our community is our first priority.

The 2020 Scott Helt Memorial Award was awarded to Manuel Fuentes, Hongzhi Chen, Eduardo Garro, Jose Luis Carcel, David Vargas, Belkacem Mouhouche, David Gomez-Barquero for their paper, “Physical Layer Performance Evaluation of LTE-Advanced Pro Broadcast and ATSC 3.0 Systems.” The papers appeared in the IEEE Transactions on Broadcasting, vol. 65, no. 3, pp. 477–488, September 2019. The purpose of the

The process of rate-distortion (RD) optimization plays a key role for video coding, which aims to achieve a tradeoff between compression efficiency and video quality distortion. Although the conventional objective distortion metric mean squared error performs well in computational complexity, it is not always in accordance with the perceptual quality perceived by human visual system (HVS). Taking the

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The Fifth generation of mobile broadband (BB) networks, popularly known as 5G, aims to revolutionize different vertical industries, including media broadcasting. Although it remains to be seen the real impact and timescale of the 5G revolution, 5G may represent an opportunity rather than a threat for broadcast (BC), especially when considering new approaches for BC and BB evolving into new converged

The fifth generation of cellular technologies, 5G, promises to deliver a wide variety of services. However, the first release of 5G (3GPP Rel-15) did not consider multicast capabilities in the 5G system including both access and core networks. This article fills the gap by describing solutions for 5G mobile core network architecture incorporating multicast and broadcast capabilities. Two innovative

Owning the merits of flexible networking, rapid deployment, strong line-of-sight communications and so on, Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) has been regarded as a promising technology for the Fifth-Generation (5G) wireless network to realise its ambition of ubiquitous connectivity to support the various applications, e.g., broadcasting/multicasting services. However, the unique features of the UAV systems

The 3 rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) has defined based on the Long Term Evolution (LTE) enhanced Multicast Broadcast Multimedia Service (eMBMS) a set of new features to support the distribution of Terrestrial Broadcast services in Release 14. On the other hand, a new 5 th Generation (5G) system architecture and radio access technology, 5G New Radio (NR), are being standardized from Release

The European Commission requires all European Union (EU) Member States to use telecommunications networks to alert the population of an ongoing crisis or an upcoming threat by June 2022. Public Warning System in Long Term Evolution (LTE) and 5G System currently supports a text-based warning using Cell Broadcast technology. Cell Broadcast does not support multimedia warning message delivery. This paper

We present the latest developments in the physical layer evolution for the transmission of Multimedia Broadcast Multicast Service (MBMS) over fifth generation (5G) cellular networks. We first provide an overview of how the MBMS physical layer has evolved during the initial releases of the Third Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) specifications and provide motivations and insights for key developments

The integration of a broadcast oriented RAN architecture into a convergent framework for heterogeneous networks offers two major contributions. On the one hand, it presents an interesting solution to satisfy the exponential growth of the mobile video data traffic, and on the other hand, it is also identified as a promising key technology, that can contribute to improve the energy efficiency of 5G networks

The adoption of OFDM as the physical layer waveform in ATSC 3.0 leaves the door open for the implementation of Single Frequency Networks (SFN). In addition, Layered Division Multiplexing (LDM), which can be understood as a low complexity approach for Non-Orthogonal Multiple Access (NOMA) techniques, has also been included as a baseline technology. These two new features can be combined to offer LDM

Many features of 5G are definitely important to the broadcasting service, including diverse content services such as follow-me TV, video-on-demand, but also gaming, Virtual reality (VR) and Augmented reality (AR) and many others. Meanwhile, those services depend more and more on the user’s position accuracy, especially in indoor environment. With the increase of broadcasting data traffic indoors, to

Broadcast encryption with personalized messages (BEPM) is a newly proposed cryptographic primitive, which supports a broadcaster to deliver the common encrypted broadcast message to a group of authorized users. It also supports a broadcaster to deliver the personalized messages to the individual authorized users simultaneously. However, none of the existing BEPM schemes consider the anonymity of authorized

Baek et al. proposed a deep learning-based signal detector for conventional MIMO systems, which is a pioneering work of applying artificial intelligence into wireless communications. Although this work works well under static fading channels, it is worth notable that it fails to work under block-fading channels. In particular, the detection BER under block-fading channels is around 0.5 even in the

In this paper, the ATSC 3.0 broadcast Radio Access Technology (RAT) is aligned with 3GPP 5G NR RAT in the context of 5G convergence starting in Release 16. The 5G system architecture release 16 includes a new 5G physical layer known as 5G NR “New Radio” and a “Cloud Native” 5G Core (5GC) using cloud computing. The 5GC is agnostic to the type of radio access technology used and is enabler of many types

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Presents a listing of the editorial board, board of governors, current staff, committee members, and/or society editors for this issue of the publication.

This paper proposes an improved decoding scheme of emergency alert wake-up bits in Advanced Television Systems Committee (ATSC) 3.0. When a broadcast service is being provided, a bootstrap signal of ATSC 3.0 includes the minimal essential information that does not change at least for two consecutive physical layer frames. Then, the received signal can be further assumed to be binary modulated according

The most recent standard for broadcast services, Advanced Television System Committee-Third Generation (ATSC 3.0), has adopted co-located multi-antenna schemes and Layered Division Multiplexing (LDM) in order to increase the capacity and reliability compared to former Digital Terrestrial Television (DTT) systems. ATSC 3.0 has adopted both technologies separately, but no combination of them is planned

Layered transmission is studied in this paper to accommodate various device capabilities and channel conditions. The problem of efficiently broadcasting a common set of layer-encoded data from a single base station to multiple users over quasi-static fading channels is examined. Considering the maximum tolerable delay, a block-level utility is defined in terms of average probability of successful reception

Quality of Experience (QoE) reflects end users' overall experience and feeling with network services, but needs support in terms of end-to-end Quality of Service (QoS). Segment routing (SR) as a new routing paradigm can provide good end-to-end QoS guarantee, making traditional multimedia traffic routing more efficient and scalable. In this paper, we address two problems related to the new SR mechanism:

There is an important trend in terms of user expectations of ubiquity in relation to rich media services and increase in number and range of devices with high specifications which enable access to such services, with very ambitious technical requirements. Providing this support is a very challenging issue, especially in urban dense network environments (DenseNet). Diverse solutions have been proposed

As technology evolves, broadcast television is shifting to 4K and 8K resolution videos. To achieve the bit-rates required for transmitting this content, multiple-input-multiple-output communication systems have been tested. Some proposals employ dual polarization links. We employ field measurements to optimize and evaluate the adequacy of the parameters of the ITU-R P.1546 propagation model in a dual

With the proliferation of portable devices, the exponential growth of the global mobile traffic brings great challenges to the traditional communication networks and the traditional wireless communication technologies. In this context, converged networks and cache-based data offloading have drawn more and more attention based on the strong correlation of services. This paper proposes a novel popular

Broadcasting has been proved to be an efficacious approach of video-on-demand (VOD) service. Over the past few decades, many scholars have devoted a great deal of time to the study of broadcasting. Among all available schemes, harmonic broadcasting (HB) scheme points out the minimum bandwidth required to broadcast a popular video given a fixed viewers' waiting time. HB divides each segment equally

The rate-distortion optimized quantization (RDOQ) in High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) brings a significant coding gain but also leads to huge computation at encoder. Since the level estimation (LE) demands dominant computational complexity among the three major internal stages inside the RDOQ, this paper addresses speeding up of the RDOQ process by simplifying the LE stage. Under the observation

The high efficiency video coding (HEVC) standard provides superior efficiency for encoding and improves the compression ratio by almost 50% compared with previous video coding standards, such as advanced video coding (AVC). However, more intensive computation complexity is introduced by implementing the flexible quad tree-structured coding model. In a typical HEVC encoder, coding units (CUs) in a coding

Although high efficiency video coding (HEVC) has achieved high coding performance, it has been shown that dependent rate-distortion optimization (RDO) can still further improve the coding performance at the encoder side. Inspired by our previous work on temporal-dependent RDO, this paper proposes a rate control method at coding tree unit (CTU) level to obtain both higher rate-distortion (R-D) performance

This paper proposes to blindly evaluate the quality of images synthesized via a depth image-based rendering (DIBR) procedure. As a significant branch of virtual reality (VR), superior DIBR techniques provide free viewpoints in many real applications, including remote surveillance and education; however, limited efforts have been made to measure the performance of DIBR techniques, or equivalently the

This paper presents an aggregate wavelet-predominant algorithm to measure the distortions in THz security images. The algorithm integrates a spectral-based sharpness estimator, a noise estimator derived alpha-stable model and an overall viewing experience estimator based on free-energy principle. Among them, the greater weight is assigned to the spectral-based sharpness estimator considering that the

Underwater images often have severe quality degradation and distortion due to light absorption and scattering in the water medium. A hazy image formation model is widely used to restore the image quality. It depends on two optical parameters: the background light (BL) and the transmission map (TM). Underwater images can also be enhanced by color and contrast correction from the perspective of image

Companding is a well-known technique for the peak-to-average-power ratio (PAPR) reduction of orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) signals. Piecewise linear companding (PLC) scheme, compared with other companding schemes, can effectively reduce PAPR with much lower complexity, while achieving improved bit-error-rate (BER) performance. However, when the PAPR target value for companded signals

In this paper, a peak to average power ratio (PAPR) reduction scheme with low complexity and high performance for orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) signals is proposed. The proposed scheme is a hybrid PAPR scheme that employs a two-stage cascade structure. The first stage is a post-IFFT stage that can construct a set of high-order quadrature amplitude modulation (QAM) sequences from

Flexible and robust transmission schemes are required to support different coded modulation modes, receiver types and channel conditions in future broadcasting systems. However, conventional low-density parity-check (LDPC) coded schemes are usually optimized towards particular scenario, and may face the problem of performance degradation in other different scenarios. In this paper, a type of quasi-cyclic

The integrated services digital broadcasting-terrestrial (ISDB-T) system adopts band segmented transmission orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (BST-OFDM) to support different services using hierarchical transmission. In the ISDB-T system, in particular, a hierarchical configuration depends on modulation type used in OFDM segment, which has to be decoded at the receiver. Therefore, it is necessary

Prospective authors are requested to submit new, unpublished manuscripts for inclusion in the upcoming event described in this call for papers.

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Fifth-Generation (5G) mobile networks are expected to perform according to the stringent performance targets assigned by standardization committees. Therefore, significant changes are proposed to the network infrastructure to achieve the expected performance levels. Network Function Virtualization, cloud computing and Software Defined Networks are some of the main technologies being utilised to ensure

The demand for multimedia services is increasing at an astonishing speed. To deal with the overwhelming data traffic, approaches such as extending available bandwidth are proposed in wireless communication technology. Apart from the enlargement of bandwidth, the enhancement of the efficiency of resource usage is also grabbing the eye. 3GPP has introduced MBMS as a solution to improve the efficiency

The development of 5G system provides a unique opportunity to implement a unified wireless transmission platform that can simultaneous deliver unicast, multicast and broadcast services using the same spectrum and the same infrastructure. This can be achieved by developing a more capable point-to-multipoint transmission (PTM) system component, also called 5G Multimedia Broadcast Multicast Services (5G-MBMS)

This paper presents Internet protocol (IP)-based convergence of broadcast and broadband networks using Advanced Television Systems Committee (ATSC) 3.0–the next generation terrestrial broadcasting standard. In the broadcast network, the combination of Layered Division Multiplexing (LDM) and Scalable High Efficiency Video Codec (SHVC) is used, enabling efficient use of spectrum when mobile and fixed

This paper studies the resource allocation for multicast transmission in wireless small cell networks, which allocates appropriate Modulation and Coding Scheme (MCS) on each physical Resource Block (RB). This problem is not trivial due to the impact of interference and the limited wireless backhaul. We first formulate our concerned problem with the objective of maximizing the network throughput. Afterwards

This paper addresses the challenge of broadcast and unicast convergence by proposing a PHY/MAC (Physical Layer/Medium Access Control) architecture for 5G New Radio (NR). The solution is based on Power domain Non Orthogonal Multiple Access (P-NOMA). The main PHY/MAC configuration parameters have been analyzed theoretically and their impact on the service configurations is presented in this manuscript

3GPP is now carrying forward the development of the point to multipoint transmission mode of 5G on the basis of the cellular infrastructure and standard. Since the dedicated proposal for multimedia broadcast multicast system (MBMS) was approved, the MBMS technologies are evolving with the update of the requirements from 3G to 5G. This paper reviews the latest progress during the evolved MBMS standardization

Broadcasting and broadband network is moving towards integration and LTE-based 5G terrestrial broadcast is now researched in Release 16 in Third Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) standardization meetings. However, the work scope of LTE-based 5G terrestrial broadcast focuses on specifying new numerologies and some minor improvement on cell acquisition subframe, which is insufficient. In this paper

There is a gap between recent development of 4K display technologies and the short storage of 4K contents. Super-Resolution (SR) serves as a bridge to harmonize the need and demand. Recently, Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) based networks have demonstrated great property in image SR. However, most existing methods require large model capacity and consume expensive computation for high performance

This work presents a potential solution for enabling the use of multicast in the 5G New Radio Release 17, called 5G NR Mixed Mode. The proposed multicast/broadcast mode follows one of the two approaches envisaged in 3GPP, which enables a dynamic and seamless switching between unicast and multicast, both in the downlink and the uplink. This paper also provides a performance evaluation of several IMT-2020

This work presents eight demonstrators and one showcase developed within the 5G-Xcast project. They experimentally demonstrate and validate key technical enablers for the future of media delivery, associated with multicast and broadcast communication capabilities in 5 th Generation (5G). In 5G-Xcast, three existing testbeds: IRT in Munich (Germany), 5GIC in Surrey (U.K.), and TUAS in Turku (Finland)

Filter bank multicarrier with offset quadrature amplitude modulation (FBMC/OQAM) is considered as a powerful supplementary waveform for future wireless communications. However, FBMC systems have the same high peak-to-average power ratio (PAPR) problem as other multi-carrier systems, and the PAPR reduction methods designed for orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) systems cannot be directly

A perceptual image compression framework is proposed in this work, including an adaptive picture-level just noticeable difference (PJND) prediction model and a perceptual coding scheme. Specifically speaking, a convolutional neural network (CNN) model is designed with the existing subjective image database to predict the PJND label for a given image. Then, the support vector regression model is utilized

As an emerging broadband service pattern in the 5G era, VR broadcasting needs a considerable amount of bandwidth and strict quality of service (QoS) control. The traditional eMBMS or enTV transmission mode in HetNets consisting of macro cells and small cells cannot bring about a good trade-off between broadband performance and resource utilization for VR broadcasting service. D2D multicasting applied

To offer commercial LDPC decoders with better performance, in this paper, multi-edge-type (MET) normalized scheme is proposed to improve the performance of traditional min-sum algorithm (MSA) and its modified versions. With respect to sum-product algorithm (SPA), we firstly analyze and find out that the degradations of convergence in different edge types are distinct in MSA theoretically. To compensate