Encapsulation and framing efficiency of DVB-S2 satellite systems

A quite remarkable evolution of wireless communications has recently taken place with the advent of physical layer adaptation to channel and system conditions both in the terrestrial and satellite arenas. This adaptation increases system performance but also introduces further dynamics and it. Therefore, it is important to ensure that the gain in performance is not reduced because upper layers do not fully exploit such dynamics as well. DVB-S2 is a specification for next-generation digital broadband satellite systems emerging from technical ad-hoc DVB working groups. In particular, this paper focuses on the interactive scenario (for which adaptive coding and modulation is normative) aiming at analyzing the DVB-S2 encapsulation and framing process and computing its efficiency. After describing the Adaptive Coding and Modulation (ACM) subsystem of the DVB-S2, a layered model is presented as well as its mapping to a layered encapsulation model. The numerical results show that for the system to be efficient the encapsulation process must multiplex users requiring the same physical layer. Moreover, the impact of additional MPEG/MPE encapsulation on the overall efficiency is analyzed.