Advanced layered divsion multiplexing technologies for next-gen broadcast

Resumen

Since the beginning of the 21st century, terrestrial broadcasting systems have been blamed of an inefficient use of the allocated spectrum. To increase the spectral efficiency, digital television Standards Developing Organizations settled to develop the technical evolution of the first-generation DTT systems. Among others, a primary goal of next-generation DTT systems (DVB-T2 and ATSC 3.0) is to simultaneously provide TV services to mobile and fixed devices. The major drawback of this simultaneous delivery is the different requirement of each reception condition. To address these constraints different multiplexing techniques have been considered. While DVB-T2 fulfilled the simultaneous delivery of the two services by TDM, ATSC 3.0 adopted the LDM technology. LDM can outperform TDM and FDM by taking advantage of the UEP ratio, as both services, namely layers, utilize all the frequency and time resources with different power levels. At receiver side, two implementations are distinguished, according to the intended layer. Mobile receivers are only intended to obtain the upper layer, known as CL. In order not to increase their complexity compared to single layer receivers, the lower layer, known as EL is treated as an additional noise on the CL decoding. Fixed receivers, increase their complexity, as they should performed a SIC process on the CL for getting the EL. To limit the additional complexity of fixed receivers, the LDM layers in ATSC 3.0 are configured with different error correction capabilities, but share the rest of physical layer parameters, including the TIL, the PP, the FFT size, and the GI. This dissertation investigates advanced technologies to optimize the LDM performance. A demapping optimization for the two LDM layers is first proposed. A capacity increase is achieved by the proposed algorithm, which takes into account the underlying layer shape in the demapping process. Nevertheless, the number of Euclidean distances to be computed can be significantly increased, contributing to not only more complex fixed receivers, but also more complex mobile receivers. Next, the most suitable ATSC 3.0 pilot configuration for LDM is determined. Considering the two layers share the same PP a trade-off between pilot density (CL) and data overhead (EL) arises. From the performance results, it is recommended the use of a not very dense PP, as they have been already designed to cope with long echoes and high speeds. The optimum pilot amplitude depends on the channel estimator at receivers (e.g. the minimum amplitude is recommended for a Wiener implementation, while the maximum for a FFT implementation). The potential combination of LDM with three advanced technologies that have been adopted in ATSC 3.0 is also investigated: MultiRF technologies, distributed MISO schemes, and co-located MIMO schemes. The potential use cases, the transmitter and receiver implementations, and the performance gains of the joint configurations are studied for the two LDM layers. The additional constraints of combining LDM with the advanced technologies is considered admissible, as the greatest demands (e.g. a second receiving chain) are already contemplated in ATSC 3.0. Significant gains are found for the mobile layer at pedestrian reception conditions thanks to the frequency diversity provided by MultiRF technologies. The conjunction of LDM with distributed MISO schemes provides significant performance gains on SFNs for the fixed layer with Alamouti scheme. Last, considering the complexity in the mobile receivers and the CL performance, the recommended joint configuration is MISO in the CL and MIMO in the EL.