Improving Broadcast Channel Rate Using Hierarchical Modulation

We investigate the design of a broadcast system where the aim is to maximise the throughput. This task is usually challenging due to the channel variability. Forty years ago, Cover introduced and compared two schemes: time sharing and superposition coding. The second scheme was proved to be optimal for some channels. Modern satellite communications systems such as DVB-SH and DVB-S2 mainly rely on time sharing strategy to optimize throughput. They consider hierarchical modulation, a practical implementation of superposition coding, but only for unequal error protection or backward compatibility purposes. We propose in this article to combine time sharing and hierarchical modulation together and show how this scheme can improve the performance in terms of available rate. We present the gain on a simple channel modeling the broadcasting area of a satellite. Our work is applied to the DVB-SH standard, which considers hierarchical modulation as an optional feature.