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)

APCO project 25 wireless data services over land mobile radio channel for smaller law enforcement agencies

Digital data messages are very important in modern communication systems and advanced mobile data technologies have opened the door to a wide range of applications and services in the public safety environment. Still, the availability of mobile data services among public safety agencies is hampered by two issues of the implementation of data communication: the reliability of commercial data services and the high cost of the equipment needed to support mixed voice and data transmissions over private land mobile radio channels. This thesis describes the design and development of an inexpensive Software Defined APCO Project 25 Data Base Station that allows smaller law enforcement agencies to enable data services in their cruisers in a cost effective way. The data base station is comprised of a standard PC interfaced to a commercial analog VHF FM transceiver via a commercial PC sound card. The base station is compliant with commercial P25 digital mobile radios and operates in parallel to commercial P25 digital voice communications equipment

Near-capacity MIMOs using iterative detection

In this thesis, Multiple-Input Multiple-Output (MIMO) techniques designed for transmission over narrowband Rayleigh fading channels are investigated. Specifically, in order to providea diversity gain while eliminating the complexity of MIMO channel estimation, a Differential Space-Time Spreading (DSTS) scheme is designed that employs non-coherent detection. Additionally, in order to maximise the coding advantage of DSTS, it is combined with Sphere Packing (SP) modulation. The related capacity analysis shows that the DSTS-SP scheme exhibits a higher capacity than its counterpart dispensing with SP. Furthermore, in order to attain additional performance gains, the DSTS system invokes iterative detection, where the outer code is constituted by a Recursive Systematic Convolutional (RSC) code, while the inner code is a SP demapper in one of the prototype systems investigated, while the other scheme employs a Unity Rate Code (URC) as its inner code in order to eliminate the error floor exhibited by the system dispensing with URC. EXIT charts are used to analyse the convergence behaviour of the iteratively detected schemes and a novel technique is proposed for computing the maximum achievable rate of the system based on EXIT charts. Explicitly, the four-antenna-aided DSTSSP system employing no URC precoding attains a coding gain of 12 dB at a BER of 10-5 and performs within 1.82 dB from the maximum achievable rate limit. By contrast, the URC aidedprecoded system operates within 0.92 dB from the same limit.On the other hand, in order to maximise the DSTS system’s throughput, an adaptive DSTSSP scheme is proposed that exploits the advantages of differential encoding, iterative decoding as well as SP modulation. The achievable integrity and bit rate enhancements of the system are determined by the following factors: the specific MIMO configuration used for transmitting data from the four antennas, the spreading factor used and the RSC encoder’s code rate.Additionally, multi-functional MIMO techniques are designed to provide diversity gains, multiplexing gains and beamforming gains by combining the benefits of space-time codes, VBLASTand beamforming. First, a system employing Nt=4 transmit Antenna Arrays (AA) with LAA number of elements per AA and Nr=4 receive antennas is proposed, which is referred to as a Layered Steered Space-Time Code (LSSTC). Three iteratively detected near-capacity LSSTC-SP receiver structures are proposed, which differ in the number of inner iterations employed between the inner decoder and the SP demapper as well as in the choice of the outer code, which is either an RSC code or an Irregular Convolutional Code (IrCC). The three systems are capable of operating within 0.9, 0.4 and 0.6 dB from the maximum achievable rate limit of the system. A comparison between the three iteratively-detected schemes reveals that a carefully designed two-stage iterative detection scheme is capable of operating sufficiently close to capacity at a lower complexity, when compared to a three-stage system employing a RSC or a two-stage system using an IrCC as an outer code. On the other hand, in order to allow the LSSTC scheme to employ less receive antennas than transmit antennas, while still accommodating multiple users, a Layered Steered Space-Time Spreading (LSSTS) scheme is proposed that combines the benefits of space-time spreading, V-BLAST, beamforming and generalised MC DS-CDMA. Furthermore, iteratively detected LSSTS schemes are presented and an LLR post-processing technique is proposed in order to improve the attainable performance of the iteratively detected LSSTS system.Finally, a distributed turbo coding scheme is proposed that combines the benefits of turbo coding and cooperative communication, where iterative detection is employed by exchanging extrinsic information between the decoders of different single-antenna-aided users. Specifically, the effect of the errors induced in the first phase of cooperation, where the two users exchange their data, on the performance of the uplink in studied, while considering different fading channel characteristics