Integrating Radio Services with Television and Data Transmisson on the ATSC 3.0 Platform

From the start of its design, the ATSC 3 broadcast system has had extensibility and flexibility as foundational precepts.  Thus, provisions were made in the resulting standards for implementation of those principles.  Taking advantage of the readiness of ATSC 3 for incorporation of flexible extensions is a recent proposal to add advanced radio broadcast capabilities to the complement of services already available through use of ATSC 3 technology.  The radio content technology is that provided by the Digital Radio Mondiale (DRM-R) system standardized by ETSI and recommended by ITU.  By adopting the same content encoding and data formatting protocols as are used for production and delivery of DRM-R radio content, parallel and potentially simultaneous broadcast of the same content using ATSC 3 physical layer transmission methods becomes practical. 

Since DRM-R radio standards already incorporate the most efficient audio encoding methods available for both voice and general audio delivery, as well as having the delivery framework with the smallest overhead data requirement, their use with ATSC 3 results in the smallest application of channel capacity possible for a given level of audio service.  In addition, the DRM-R standards incorporate the most advanced text-based ancillary services currently available to accompany radio program delivery (i.e., Journaline). Thus, the proposed addition of DRM-R services to ATSC 3 can enable carriage of literally hundreds of audio and text-based radio services in a relatively few Mb/s of channel capacity, while enjoying all the benefits of ATSC 3 physical layer transmission.  The proposed scheme for the ATSC 3 extension will be described.