Co-located and distributed MISO techniques in DVB-T2 Single Frequency Networks

Abstract

In this paper, the impact of various diversity schemes of Alamouti Multiple Input Single Output (MISO) technique applied in Digital Video Broadcasting-Terrestrial second generation (DVB-T2) system has been evaluated. The advantage of diversity technique is exploited to improve the signal robustness in an Single Frequency Network (SFN). Co-located and distributed diversity topologies are foreseen to deploy MISO in DVB-T2 system. While the former supposes that transmitters are localized on the same site, the latter implements transmitters at distributed sites. In this work, the performance highlighted by these topologies is presented in comparison to the performance of Single Input Single Output (SISO) technique. Moreover, in addition to the Bit Error Rate (BER) classically used to evaluate system performance, the Modulation Error Ratio (MER) is also used. The results have shown that co-located MISO technique outperforms SISO technique by 2.18 dB while distributed MISO technique outperforms SISO technique by 5.37 dB at a BER of 10−5 in presence of Rayleigh P1 channel. In the case of SFN, co-located MISO technique outperforms SISO technique by 2.58 dB while MISO distributed mode outperforms SISO technique by 15.24 dB at a BER of 10−5. Furthermore, the MER values confirm the performance improvement of DVB-T2 system when distributed MISO is exploited.