DVB-T2 Standard Research Articles

Investigation and Simulation of a Noise-Resistant 16-Qam Demodulator in A Dvb-T2 Standard Digital Tv System Using the Matlab/Simulink Program Environment

In this work, a noise-immune 16-QAM demodulator in a digital television system of the DVB-T2 standard is investigated and modeled using the Matlab/Simulink software environment. The requirements for normalized technical parameters that determine the quality and noise immunity of a 16-QAM demodulator in the DVB-T2 standard have been analyzed and investigated. Various communication channels are modeled and investigated, such as: the Gaussian, Rice and Rayleigh channel to determine and measure the signal-to-noise ratio, the theoretical and practical influence of communication channels on noise immunity without a filter and with a filter. The results of researches on the dependence of the bit error probability and the number of bits received with an error on Eb/N0, the spectrum of 16-QAM signals and constellation diagrams are presented.

Determination of the optimal frame length of digital television broadcasting

The paper proposes a simple method for determining the optimal frame length in the DVB-T2 standard based on simple and understandable formulas based on the sequence of processing user data in the DVB-T2 standard. There should always be an integer number of FEC blocks in a T2 frame, the remaining cells that do not make up an entire FEC block will be dummy cells as a rule and represent a speed loss. As a result, the total bit rate and the depth of interleaving in the smallest details depend on the exact number of OFDM characters, and consequently, the cells in the T2 frame.

Comparative Analysis of Methods for Calculating the Energy Flux Density used in Assessing the Permissible Level of Environmental Pollution by Electromagnetic Radiation

In this article, the results of measurements and calculations of the power flux density in the frequency range 670 MHz-766 MHz (46th and 57th television channels) of digital broadcasting of the DVBT2 standard were presented. Experimental data on the power flux density were obtained by the selective electromagnetic field meters NARDA SRM-3000 with an isotropic antenna. The radiating system consists of 16 panel antennas (four-storey panel antennas) with a circular radiation pattern in the horizontal plane. Calculations were carried out in the ПК АЭМО (Software package for electromagnetic environment analysis) and MMANA programs. The data obtained were compared with the permissible exposure limit (PEL) of energy flux density (EFD) set by health and safety rules and standards (2.1.8/2.2.4.1383-03), which operate on the territory of Russia.The values obtained are significantly less than the acceptable levels. In the USA, Japan, European countries, Canada, China, and the PEL of energy flux density in the frequency range 300 MHz – 300 GHz are higher than in Russia.

Features of determining the parameters of digital television broadcasting

The DVB-T 2 terrestrial digital television broadcasting standard allows to use a wide range of user data transfer rates. In the literature, rather cumbersome and complex formulas for calculating the transfer rates of user data are given. The article offers a simple method for determining the optimal user data transfer rate based on simple and understandable formulas founded on the sequence of user data processing in the DVB-T2 standard.

IMPLEMENTATION OF FPGA-BASED DVB-T2 TRANSMITTER FOR A SECOND GENERATION DIGITAL TERRESTRIAL TELEVISION BROADCASTING SYSTEM

Nowadays, with strong development of Science and Technology, integrated circuits continue to dominate not only in the field of digital information. Over the last several years, Technological television industry has taken huge strides and powerful transformation to meet with government’s policy about digitization of television all over the country in period 2015 – 2020. Stemming from the practical needs of “localization of products” and mastering of technological design of DVB-T2 transmitter (Digital Video Broadcasting – Terrestrial for Second generation), the authors have made an effort to research in algorithm, designed and tested in Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) technology. DVB-T2 is mainly aimed to replace the current standard DVB-T. The main motivation of DVB-T2 is to provide broadcasters with more advanced and efficient alternative to DVB-T standards. In DVB-T2 transmitter system, digital audio, video, and other data are compressed into a single signal to be transmitted on a single RF channel, using orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM) with concatenated channel coding and interleaving. The higher offered bit rate makes it a suited system for carrying HDTV signals on the terrestrial TV channel. The next generation broadcasting systems should be designed to make full use of spectral resources while providing reliable transmissions in order to enable services like multichannel HDTV (High Definition Television) and innovative data casting services. The efficient usage of the radio spectrum can be achieved by the introduction of Single Frequency Networks (SFN). Digital transmitter DVB-T2 implemented on FPGA using a software Xilinx System Generator for DSP tool and Xilinx ISE Design Suite 14.7. System Generator for DSP is in conjunction on environment MATLAB-Simulink that is capable of simulating the proposed hardware structures that is synthesized and implemented by the programmable elements in Field-programmable Gate Arrays. In this project, adaptative MPEG-TS bitrate converter is designed to allows to increasing or reducing the MPEG TS rate by adding or filtering NULL packets. The entire digital transmitter DVB-T2 is integrated in one chip Xilinx FPGA Kintex-7 XC7K325T-1FFG676. Experimental design on development Kit NetFPGA-1G-CML of Digilent Corporation is performed at design department of technology center of Vietnamese Communications Television Development JSC. Authors are continuing to improve products, put into practical applications to replace the digital terrestrial television broadcasting stations that are being used in Vietnam. The article named “Implementation of FPGA-based DVB-T2 transmitter for a second generation digital terrestrial television broadcasting system” presents the research results, design methods, test results to compare, evaluate the accuracy of algorithm implementation. The results open up new directions for technological television in Vietnam.

Features of Measurements in Single-Frequency Networks of Second Generation Digital Terrestrial Television of the Using the Example of Analysis of Signals of Transmitting Stations of Leningrad Region

Continuous monitoring of the status of the television network is necessary to ensure uninterrupted and high-quality broadcasting of digital air television signals. This report considers the method of measuring the single-frequency network of standard DVB-T2, presents the results of theoretical calculation of the coverage area of several single transmitting stations of digital air television of Leningrad region and shows the results of practical measurements of the total coverage area of DT-TV stations, as well as recommendations on the selection of the location of the control equipment.

Hardware-Efficient and Fast Sensing-Time Maximum-Minimum-Eigenvalue-Based Spectrum Sensor for Cognitive Radio Network

This paper proposes an implementation-friendly maximum-minimum-eigenvalue (MME)-based spectrum sensing algorithm for cognitive radio network. An iterative power method has been applied for the first time to compute maximum and minimum eigenvalues that reduces the computational complexity of this MME algorithm. We suggest new digital architecture of MME-based spectrum sensor with shorter critical-path delay that lowers its sensing time. This spectrum-sensor architecture has been resource shared to further enhance the hardware efficiency. Performance analysis of the suggested MME algorithm with 1024 input-signal samples delivers adequate performance at −10 dB of SNR with the detection probability of 0.8. Suggested MME algorithm performs better than the energy detection-based spectrum sensing under noise uncertainty. It has detection gain of 5.3 dB compared to the cyclostationary feature detection-based spectrum sensing algorithm at 0.7 detection probability. Hardware prototyping of our MME spectrum sensor has been carried out in FPGA platform and its real-time testing is performed using the communication environment of DVB-T standard. We synthesized and post-layout simulated proposed digital sensor in 90 nm-CMOS process that resulted in 0.42 mm2 of area, operating at a maximum clock frequency of 404 MHz which results in the sensing time of $53.5~\mu \text{s}$ . Comparison of our work with literature shows that the suggested MME spectrum-sensor has $2.5\times $ shorter sensing time and lowest area-time-product of 0.023, indicating better hardware-efficiency, than the state-of-the-art implementations.

Toward 3D passive radar exploiting DVB-T2 transmitters of opportunity

This article presents the configuration and technical specification of the passive radar exploiting third-party transmitters of second-generation digital video broadcasting standard DVB-T2 as illuminators of opportunity. The performance of the two-dimensional (2D) passive radar estimated based on theoretical and experimental study is described. The possible configuration of the 2D non-equidistant antenna array for the three-dimensional (3D) passive radar is proposed to ensure the 3D localization of detected targets. The experimental results on drone detection conducted with the 3D passive radar show that the radar with the 2D antenna array is capable to measure not only azimuth but also elevation and consequently target altitude.

EXIT-Chart Aided Design of Row-Permutation Assisted Twin-Interleaver BICM-ID

Twin-interleaver bit-interleaved LDPC coded modulation (BICM) has been widely adopted and studied in the context of digital terrestrial transmission (DTT) systems. Extrinsic-information transfer (EXIT) charts have been used as an analysis tool to evaluate the iterative decoding performance and to design a twin-interleaver BICM system. Since BICM using iterative decoding (BICM-ID) exhibits capacity-approaching decoding performance, developing the conventional twin-interleaver BICM DTT system to a BICM-ID system has also been attempted. When considering the twin-interleaver BICM-ID systems, there are a couple of aspects that should be taken into account. We will demonstrate that anti-Gray mapping should be adopted for improving the iterative decoding performance instead of the classic Gray symbol mapping. However, the previous literature related to designing the associated row-permutation interleaver (RPI) was mainly focused on BICM systems relying on Gray mapping. Hence, we will design the RPI of the twin-interleaver BICM-ID DTT systems using an anti-Gray mapping. Explicitly, we use: 1) the EXIT-chart analysis that accurately visualizes the overall iterative decoding and demapping performance of the twin-interleaver BICM-ID DTT systems using anti-Gray mapping and 2) a preprocessing stage for eliminating duplicate RPI candidates by using a parameter that roughly predicts the EXIT-chart analysis result before the EXIT-chart analysis is involved. By the elimination of the duplicates, over 99% of the initial candidates of the RPIs can be removed from the original M! candidates, where M stands for the number of modulated bits in a symbol. Given this drastically reduced number of candidates, the proposed design method finds novel RPIs, having superior bit-error ratio performances over the conventional RPIs in the context of the DVB-T2 standard.

Implementation of a standard inner convolutional codec for DVB-T system using VHDL

Forward error correction (FEC) plays a vital role in digital communication systems. DVB-T system uses FEC as a channel coding technique to restore any data lost through transmission to the receiver. DVB-T system uses two levels of error protection. The first level is applied in the data transmitted by using a Reed-Solomon RS (204, 188) code followed by a convolutional interleaver. The other level of error protection is a punctured convolutional inner coding followed by an inner interleave in which the data sequence is rearranged again to minimize the influence of burst errors.This paper describes the implementation of inner convolutional codec (Convolutional coder and Viterbi Decoder) and inner de/interleaving of a standard DVB-T system with a constrained length of 7 and a code rate of 2/3 using VHDL on virtex-6 FPGA xc6vlx240t. The designed channel convolutional encoder and Viterbi decoder follow European Standard ETSI EN 300 744 for digital terrestrial television. Verification of the design is accomplished by loop back and by comparison with the corresponding Xilinx core. Utilization and timing re-ports of the implemented device on Vertex 6 are included.

INTRODUCTION OF DIGITAL TELEVISION OF DVB-T2 ON THE 9 CHANNEL IN THE DNIPRO CITY

Context. The problem of the regional television channel transition from analogue broadcasting to digital broadcasting has been solved.Objective is to identify and overcome the difficulties of the local transition to digital television standard DVB-T2 on the example of theusual regional television company.Method. A two-level transition of the regional TV channel from analog to digital broadcasting is proposed. The first level includes theelection of the best video format for broadcasting in the DVB-T2 standard and HDTV, as well as two options for replacing the televisionequipment that can provide digital terrestrial second generation digital terrestrial television and high definition television. The two options forreplacing equipment are due to the limited funds that can allocate TV company for a short time interval on the technical re-equipment. At thesecond level, the city level to calculate the real range of coverage of digital broadcasting and the proposed methods of achieving it.Results. In this example, the technique of the transition from analogue to digital broadcasting for usual regional television companies isshown. Calculations carried out on the example of TV Private TV Dnipro – «Channel 9», the city Dnipro showed that the existing analoguesystem fixing, processing and transportation of the video on the regional TV channel will require the complete replacement of the equipment. Depending on the volume of finances allocated for modernization, two ways of replacing equipment are suggested. Calculations showed that minimally satisfactory coverage of digital TV in the city Dnipro provided at a distance of about 65 km. However, the quality of digital television on the verge of coverage is not provided in full by poor field strength at the point of maximum distance from the TV center.Conclusions. The method of transition of the regional TV channel from analogue broadcasting to digital broadcasting has been developed. It can be recommended for use in practice, considering local conditions in other regional channels in Ukraine.

Interference Analysis for DVB-T2 Network Planning in Colombia with other Television Broadcasting Technologies

Across the Andean Region the Digital Television (DTT)is already in motion. While most of countries in South America have adopted the Brazilian adaptation of the Japanese DTT standard ISDB-Tb, Colombia selected the second-generation Europan DTT standard DVB-T2, generating unique and completely new coexistence broadcasting scenarios, Firstly, it is the first region in the word in which DVB-T2 and ISDB-Tb coexist. Additionally, DVB-T2 have to coexist with analogue TV NTSC transmissions until the analogue switch-off. This paper provides interference protection ratios based on laboratory measurements and performs coexistence studies in realistic scenarios to illustrate the importance of assessing the protection ratios to achieve an efficient spectrum usage.

TOA Estimation for Positioning With DVB-T Signals in Outdoor Static Tests

Digital television signal is a promising signal of opportunity for wireless positioning. This paper studies the time of arrival (TOA) estimation on the European standard DVB-T signals in the context of positioning. Theoretical analysis on the autocorrelation of the pilot signal and multipath error envelop suggests that DVB-T has the appropriate characteristics for positioning. A software defined radio-based DVB-T receiver is developed for field testing, in which the radio frequency DVB-T signals are first sampled by universal software radio peripheral, and then algorithms of the coarse symbol synchronization, the pilot detection, the first path acquisition, and the delay tracking are sequentially performed to obtain the TOA estimation. To quantify the TOA tracking results on real DVB-T signals, field testing campaigns are carried out in five cities in Southern France. Test results showed that, in the high signal-noise ratio condition, the 2- $\sigma$ error interval is within 1 m. By taking into account all the field tests, the interval of 95% accuracy is within 4 m and the corresponding ${C/N_{0}}$ varies from 48 to 62 dB-Hz. In addition, with the developed TOA estimation method, the synchronization of the emitters with global positioning system time is evaluated and the distance difference of the multiple emitters within single frequency networks are also measured during the tests.

A Second-Generation Digital Terrestrial Television Wireless Return Channel Standard for Providing Internet Connectivity in Rural Areas in Latin America

This paper proposes the development of a second-generation digital terrestrial television wireless return channel for providing universal Internet access in rural areas in Latin America, namely DVB-RCT2. The paper reviews the first-generation return channel terrestrial standard DVB-RCT, and discusses which features of the state-of-the-art second-generation digital terrestrial TV standard DVB-T2 should be adopted for DVB-RCT2. Capacity and coverage performance estimations for DVB-RCT2 are provided.

Broadband DVB-T2 Channels at a Physical Level – Simulation Analysis

Digital video broadcasting (DVB) decreases the proportion of broadcasting channels used for existing programmes. Second-generation DVB standards offer increased bit rates, enabling more programmes per broadcasting channel than in case of the first generation. On the other hand, increased bit rate needed for high definition programmes requires combining of the capacity of few single channels producing a broadband one. Also, statistical multiplexing allows more efficient usage of capacity. Terrestrial broadcasting standard DVB-T2 enables the time frequency slicing (TFS), as a way of connecting channels at the media access control (MAC) level. This paper deals with the two types of a broadband channels at physical layer. Compared to the TFS mode, method proposed here utilizes the allocated bandwidth in a more efficient way. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5755/j01.eee.21.1.5584

Behavioral Modeling and Predistortion of Power Amplifiers Under Sparsity Hypothesis

A simple and flexible technique for improving the modeling and predistortion of power amplifiers is presented. The technique, which relies on the sparsity assumption for the kernel coefficients of the full Volterra (FV) behavioral model, combines a greedy algorithm for the selection of the active coefficients, a maximum likelihood method for their estimation and an information criterion for determining the best model. The approach has been applied to the design of reduced-parameters FV-based digital predistorters for three power amplifiers driven with orthogonal frequency division multiplexing signals, following the LTE and DVB-T2 standards, and a multichannel wideband code-division multiple access signal. Results show that the proposed linearizers meet the spectral masks and error vector magnitude constraints of the referred standards and provide a reduction better than 45% in the number of parameters, compared to the FV predistorters.

A Unified Broadcast Layer for Horizon 2020 Delivery of Multimedia Services

It is expected that, in the coming years, the video data traffic carried by mobile networks will increase drastically. Among the different ways of facing this “mobile data tsunami,” the cooperation of several complementary access technologies offers promising prospects. In the context of such a cooperative approach, this paper proposes the definition of a unified broadcast layer, close to the 3GPP LTE technology, and therefore liable to be easily integrated in mobile devices and infrastructure equipment. The general technical requirements for the design of such a common physical layer are detailed and a practical example based on the 3GPP LTE/E-MBMS and DVB-T2 standards is described. The verification of the proposed approach is performed through simulation results and validation tests carried out on a hardware platform.

DVB-NGH: The Next Generation of Digital Broadcast Services to Handheld Devices

This paper reviews the main technical solutions adopted by the next-generation mobile broadcasting standard DVB-NGH, the handheld evolution of the second-generation digital terrestrial TV standard DVB-T2. The main new technical elements introduced with respect to DVB-T2 are: layered video coding with multiple physical layer pipes, time-frequency slicing, full support of an IP transport layer with a dedicated protocol stack, header compression mechanisms for both IP and MPEG-2 TS packets, new low-density parity check coding rates for the data path (down to 1/5), nonuniform constellations for 64 Quadrature Amplitude Modulation (QAM) and 256QAM, 4-D rotated constellations for Quadrature Phase Shift Keying (QPSK), improved time interleaving in terms of zapping time, end-to-end latency and memory consumption, improved physical layer signaling in terms of robustness, capacity and overhead, a novel distributed multiple input-single output transmit diversity scheme for single-frequency networks (SFNs), and efficient provisioning of local content in SFNs. All these technological solutions, together with the high performance of DVB-T2, make DVB-NGH a real next-generation mobile multimedia broadcasting technology. In fact, DVB-NGH can be regarded the first third-generation broadcasting system because it allows for the possibility of using multiple input-multiple output antenna schemes to overcome the Shannon limit of single antenna wireless communications. Furthermore, DVB-NGH also allows the deployment of an optional satellite component forming a hybrid terrestrial-satellite network topology to improve the coverage in rural areas where the installation of terrestrial networks could be uneconomical.

Software-defined DVT-T2 demodulator using scalable DSP processors

This paper describes the feasibility of software-defined demodulator of DVB-T2 standard using the scalable DSP processor. This paper focuses mainly on the DVB-T2 receiver design and implementation of four major software blocks of the demodulator: FFTs, channel estimator, multi-level de-interleavers and rotated QAM soft-demapper. In particular, 2K-point FFT function is analyzed and mapped on the scalable architecture of coarse-grained reconfigurable array (CGRA) processors resulting 51dB signal to quantization noise ratio (SQNR) performance. The computational burden of frequency interpolator and frequency/cell deinterleavers are greatly reduced with specially designed intrinsics, 30% and 85%, respectively, from the original implementation. The softdemapper for rotated QAM constellation becomes feasible with the latest 1D-MMSE decorrelation method though it is still the most expensive function covering 40% of DTG106 mode. By implementing full chain demodulation software including abovementioned four major functions, it is demonstrated that the software-defined DVB-T2 demodulator is realizable with software on two scalable CGRA processors running at 300MHz.

Performance of DVB-T/DVB-T2 digital broadcasting systems in the presence of quadrature impairments

In this article author’s study results in direction of performance analysis of digital terrestrial television broadcasting system in DVB-T and DVB-T2 standards in combined influence of quadrature impairments and AWGN. Main purpose of studies is estimation of technical operational quality degradation in such systems in different conditions of performance non-ideality of quadrature modulator/ demodulator with different relationship between impairments for combined influence. For this the simulation model of DVB-T2 system path providing possibility of quantitative and qualitative estimation of technical operational quality in condition of quadrature impairments and AWGN is implemented in Matlab/ Simulink mathematical modelling environment. As a result quantitative and qualitative estimations of DVB-T rand DVB-T2 performance in condition of combined influence of quadrature impairments, i.e. I/Q amplitude and phase imbalance, and AWGN, with definition of threshold levels of impairments are provided for the first time. Moreover indepth analysis of influence of configuration choice of DVB-T/DVB-T2 systems on acceptable impairment level during appearing of I/Q amplitude and phase imbalance and AWGN are carried out. Derived values can be used for such impairment level fixing and control during technical maintenance, certification tests and starting-up/adjustment work.