European terrestrial digital television receiver performance comparison study under strong multipath interference

Abstract

The main purpose of this thesis is to implement a complete simulation of the European Digital Terrestrial Broadcasting standards known as "Digital Video Broadcasting -- Terrestrial" (DVB-T) and "Second Generation Digital Video Broadcasting -- Terrestrial" (DVB-T2). These standards have been developed primarily for Europe (especially DVB-T in early 90s), but these two standards are in the process of getting wider acceptance among several countries in Africa, Asia, Middle East and Oceania as well as Europe. One of the most important aspects of these standards is the Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM) which has been simulated in this thesis. A comparative study between DVB-T and DVB-T2 has been provided in detail when both of these transmission standards are exposed to strong multipath interference. Various strong multipath scenarios have been created and simulated with respect to different power delay profiles and mobility conditions. The strong multipath indicates a channel profile whose scattered paths have strong power and relatively high delay spread. It has been shown that DVB-T2 standard outperforms DVB-T standard under strong multipath interference and achieves nearly from three to nine decibels power gain according to applied channel profile, code rate and modulation parameters.