A concept of digital terrestrial television broadcasting

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The future terrestrial television broadcasting system should support the transmission of a digital HDTV signal with a high spectral efficiency. In addition, this system should maintain graceful degradation as the actual analog systems, and should be compatible with the SDTV. The system compatibility can be achieved by using a hierarchical HDTV source-coding scheme that can provide at least two (HDTV, SDTV) or three (HDTV, EDTV, SDTV) hierarchy levels: SDTV image quality will be expected for portable receivers, and HDTV/EDTV image quality will destinate to stationary receivers with roof-top antennas. Taking into account the receivers' antenna gains and the different channel conditions, there will be a difference of 25–30 dB between the received powers of the stationary and the portable receivers. Therefore, the design of a powerful and a suitable transmission scheme for the future broadcasting of the digital HDTV signal will be a technological challenge. In this article we describe a concept of a flexible reconfigurable hierarchical digital terrestrial TV broadcasting system for clear and taboo channels. The flexibility of the proposed scheme easily permits the receivers to support different reconfigurable modes: One HDTV program or multi-programming EDTV or SDTV (for fixed receivers up to 5 × SDTV in clear and up to 2 × SDTV in taboo channels; for portable receivers up to 2 × SDTV.) The system achieves a high interoperability with the Satellite Baseline system. It maintains a graceful degradation and provides a hierarchical complexity. It is based on a concatenated coding scheme. The inner code of the concatenated coding scheme is combined with multi-resolution modulation. The basic constellation is a 64-QAM, which will be operated in clear channels. It can be reconfigured to a 16-QAM in the case of taboo channels. The principle of OFDM with very rugged frequency/time synchronization mechanisms is used to combat the frequency selectivity and the co-channel interference (CCI) in the channel. Known pilot symbols are sent regularly in order to perform coherent detection.