A survey of digital television broadcast transmission techniques

This paper is a survey of the transmission techniques used in digital television (TV) standards worldwide. With the increase in the demand for High-Definition (HD) TV, video-on-demand and mobile TV services, there was a real need for more bandwidth-efficient, flawless and crisp video quality, which motivated the migration from analogue to digital broadcasting. In this paper we present a brief history of the development of TV and then we survey the transmission technology used in different digital terrestrial, satellite, cable and mobile TV standards in different parts of the world. First, we present the Digital Video Broadcasting standards developed in Europe for terrestrial (DVB-T/T2), for satellite (DVB-S/S2), for cable (DVB-C) and for hand-held transmission (DVB-H). We then describe the Advanced Television System Committee standards developed in the USA both for terrestrial (ATSC) and for hand-held transmission (ATSC-M/H). We continue by describing the Integrated Services Digital Broadcasting standards developed in Japan for Terrestrial (ISDB-T) and Satellite (ISDB-S) transmission and then present the International System for Digital Television (ISDTV), which was developed in Brazil by adopteding the ISDB-T physical layer architecture. Following the ISDTV, we describe the Digital Terrestrial television Multimedia Broadcast (DTMB) standard developed in China. Finally, as a design example, we highlight the physical layer implementation of the DVB-T2 standar

Iterative Soft Input Soft Output Decoding of Reed-Solomon Codes by Adapting the Parity Check Matrix

An iterative algorithm is presented for soft-input-soft-output (SISO) decoding of Reed-Solomon (RS) codes. The proposed iterative algorithm uses the sum product algorithm (SPA) in conjunction with a binary parity check matrix of the RS code. The novelty is in reducing a submatrix of the binary parity check matrix that corresponds to less reliable bits to a sparse nature before the SPA is applied at each iteration. The proposed algorithm can be geometrically interpreted as a two-stage gradient descent with an adaptive potential function. This adaptive procedure is crucial to the convergence behavior of the gradient descent algorithm and, therefore, significantly improves the performance. Simulation results show that the proposed decoding algorithm and its variations provide significant gain over hard decision decoding (HDD) and compare favorably with other popular soft decision decoding methods.Comment: 10 pages, 10 figures, final version accepted by IEEE Trans. on Information Theor

Design of a simulation platform to test next generation of terrestrial DVB

Digital Terrestrial Television Broadcasting (DTTB) is a member of our daily life routine, and nonetheless, according to new users’ necessities in the fields of communications and leisure, new challenges are coming up. Moreover, the current Standard is not able to satisfy all the potential requirements. For that reason, first of all, a review of the current Standard has been performed within this work. Then, it has been identified the needing of developing a new version of the standard, ready to support enhanced services, as for example broadcasting transmissions to moving terminals or High Definition Television (HDTV) transmissions, among others. The main objective of this project is the design and development of a physical layer simulator of the whole DVB-T standard, including both the complete transmission and reception procedures. The simulator has been developed in Matlab. A detailed description of the simulator both from a functional and an architectural point of view is included. The simulator is the base for testing any possible modifications that may be included into the DVB-T2 future standard. In fact, several proposed enhancements have already been carried out and their performance has been evaluated. Specifically, the use of higher order modulation schemes, and the corresponding modifications in all the system blocks, have been included and evaluated. Furthermore, the simulator will allow testing other enhancements as the use of more efficient encoders and interleavers, MIMO technologies, and so on. A complete set of numerical results showing the performance of the different parts of the system, are presented in order to validate the correctness of the implementation and to evaluate both the current standard performance and the proposed enhancements. This work has been performed within the context of a project called FURIA, which is a strategic research project funded by the Spanish Ministry of Industry, Tourism and Commerce. A brief description of this project and its consortium has been also included herein, together with an introduction to the current situation of the DTTB in Spain (called TDT in Spanish)

Design of a simulation platform to test next generation of terrestrial DVB

Digital Terrestrial Television Broadcasting (DTTB) is a member of our daily life routine, and nonetheless, according to new users’ necessities in the fields of communications and leisure, new challenges are coming up. Moreover, the current Standard is not able to satisfy all the potential requirements. For that reason, first of all, a review of the current Standard has been performed within this work. Then, it has been identified the needing of developing a new version of the standard, ready to support enhanced services, as for example broadcasting transmissions to moving terminals or High Definition Television (HDTV) transmissions, among others. The main objective of this project is the design and development of a physical layer simulator of the whole DVB-T standard, including both the complete transmission and reception procedures. The simulator has been developed in Matlab. A detailed description of the simulator both from a functional and an architectural point of view is included. The simulator is the base for testing any possible modifications that may be included into the DVB-T2 future standard. In fact, several proposed enhancements have already been carried out and their performance has been evaluated. Specifically, the use of higher order modulation schemes, and the corresponding modifications in all the system blocks, have been included and evaluated. Furthermore, the simulator will allow testing other enhancements as the use of more efficient encoders and interleavers, MIMO technologies, and so on. A complete set of numerical results showing the performance of the different parts of the system, are presented in order to validate the correctness of the implementation and to evaluate both the current standard performance and the proposed enhancements. This work has been performed within the context of a project called FURIA, which is a strategic research project funded by the Spanish Ministry of Industry, Tourism and Commerce. A brief description of this project and its consortium has been also included herein, together with an introduction to the current situation of the DTTB in Spain (called TDT in Spanish)

Self-concatenated coding for wireless communication systems

In this thesis, we have explored self-concatenated coding schemes that are designed for transmission over Additive White Gaussian Noise (AWGN) and uncorrelated Rayleigh fading channels. We designed both the symbol-based Self-ConcatenatedCodes considered using Trellis Coded Modulation (SECTCM) and bit-based Self- Concatenated Convolutional Codes (SECCC) using a Recursive Systematic Convolutional (RSC) encoder as constituent codes, respectively. The design of these codes was carried out with the aid of Extrinsic Information Transfer (EXIT) charts. The EXIT chart based design has been found an efficient tool in finding the decoding convergence threshold of the constituent codes. Additionally, in order to recover the information loss imposed by employing binary rather than non-binary schemes, a soft decision demapper was introduced in order to exchange extrinsic information withthe SECCC decoder. To analyse this information exchange 3D-EXIT chart analysis was invoked for visualizing the extrinsic information exchange between the proposed Iteratively Decoding aided SECCC and soft-decision demapper (SECCC-ID). Some of the proposed SECTCM, SECCC and SECCC-ID schemes perform within about 1 dB from the AWGN and Rayleigh fading channels’ capacity. A union bound analysis of SECCC codes was carried out to find the corresponding Bit Error Ratio (BER) floors. The union bound of SECCCs was derived for communications over both AWGN and uncorrelated Rayleigh fading channels, based on a novel interleaver concept.Application of SECCCs in both UltraWideBand (UWB) and state-of-the-art video-telephone schemes demonstrated its practical benefits.In order to further exploit the benefits of the low complexity design offered by SECCCs we explored their application in a distributed coding scheme designed for cooperative communications, where iterative detection is employed by exchanging extrinsic information between the decoders of SECCC and RSC at the destination. In the first transmission period of cooperation, the relay receives the potentially erroneous data and attempts to recover the information. The recovered information is then re-encoded at the relay using an RSC encoder. In the second transmission period this information is then retransmitted to the destination. The resultant symbols transmitted from the source and relay nodes can be viewed as the coded symbols of a three-component parallel-concatenated encoder. At the destination a Distributed Binary Self-Concatenated Coding scheme using Iterative Decoding (DSECCC-ID) was employed, where the two decoders (SECCC and RSC) exchange their extrinsic information. It was shown that the DSECCC-ID is a low-complexity scheme, yet capable of approaching the Discrete-input Continuous-output Memoryless Channels’s (DCMC) capacity.Finally, we considered coding schemes designed for two nodes communicating with each other with the aid of a relay node, where the relay receives information from the two nodes in the first transmission period. At the relay node we combine a powerful Superposition Coding (SPC) scheme with SECCC. It is assumed that decoding errors may be encountered at the relay node. The relay node then broadcasts this information in the second transmission period after re-encoding it, again, using a SECCC encoder. At the destination, the amalgamated block of Successive Interference Cancellation (SIC) scheme combined with SECCC then detects and decodes the signal either with or without the aid of a priori information. Our simulation results demonstrate that the proposed scheme is capable of reliably operating at a low BER for transmission over both AWGN and uncorrelated Rayleigh fading channels. We compare the proposed scheme’s performance to a direct transmission link between the two sources having the same throughput