European industry has already developed successful standards in the past, and I am very con dent that on the basis of DVB-H, Mobile TV services can developtheeconomiesofscaletheyneedfortake-upacrossEuropeandaround the world, With these words of EUs Telecom Commissioner Viviane Reding, DVB-H is destined to be a dominating mobile TV technology in Europe and even in the world. I was ?rst getting in touch with the DVB technology when I was doing my PhD research in Brunel University in UK in 2002. At that time DVB-T was already a mature and widely used digital broadcast technology and anyone could easily buy a DVB-T receiver in the market to try the digital broadcast signals that have been already broadcasted in UK since 1998. Then the DVB technology world changed dramatically. As a more ?exible and robust terr- trial broadcast system targeting handsets, DVB-H was developed based on DVB-T. In 2003 the DVB-H community were continuously working to ?n- ize the standard. Finally in November 2004 DVB-H was adopted as an ETSI standard EN 302 304. I was lucky to see all these changes when I was doing my PhD research in DVB technology. And I was very proud to be involved in the di erent DVB-H research projects since the beginning of the DVB-H standard development stage. I was also lucky enough that I am one of the ?rst persons who ?nished PhD degree by focusing on DVB-H research.
This book gives a detailed description of the handover issues in DVB-H networks, in converged DVB-H/UMTS networks and in hybrid DVB-H/DMB-T networks. The current status and the future research directions of DVB-H and DVB-H handover are also presented.
