Comparison of adaptive equalization methods for the ATSC and DVB-T digital television broadcast systems

Abstract

The ATSC and DVB-T international standards for terrestrial digital television broadcasting employ substantially different data transmission schemes and employ fundamentally different techniques for adaptive equalization of time-varying frequency-selective fading channels. These differences, as well as the different percentages of the channel capacity dedicated to training signals, have significant effects on the degree of time variation that can be tracked by these equalizers, as well as on the carrier to noise ratio penalty associated with equalization. Performance comparisons of a recently developed ATSC adaptive equalizer with previously published DVB-T results demonstrate that for stationary reception of digital television signals, the new ATSC equalizer is capable of canceling strong multipath echoes at the dynamic phase rotation rates typical of stationary reception, while maintaining the C/N advantage that ATSC has over DVB-T in Gaussian channels. DVB-T equalizers continue to hold an advantage in tracking high frequency dynamics associated with mobile reception, but with a C/N penalty that increases with echo phase rotation rate.