Next-Generation Digital Television Terrestrial Broadcasting Systems: Key Technologies and Research Trends
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DAI LAYOUT_Layout 1 5/22/12 5:23 PM Page 150 TOPICS IN CONSUMER COMMUNICATIONS AND NETWORKING Next-Generation Digital Television Terrestrial Broadcasting Systems: Key Technologies and Research Trends Linglong Dai, Zhaocheng Wang, and Zhixing Yang, Tsinghua University ABSTRACT Advanced Television Systems Committee (ATSC) of the U.S., Digital Video Broadcast- In the last two decades, digital television ter- ing-Terrestrial (DVB-T) proposed by Euro- restrial broadcasting (DTTB) systems have been pean Telecommunications Standards Institute deployed worldwide. With the approval of the (ETSI), Integrated Service Digital Broadcast- fourth DTTB standard called Digital Televi- ing-Terrestrial (ISDB-T) developed by Japan, sion/Terrestrial Multimedia Broadcasting and DTMB from China. In the last twenty (DTMB) by International Telecommunications years, those DTTB standards have been suc- Union (ITU) in December 2011, the research on cessfully adopted by many countries. Although first-generation DTTB standards is coming to an HDTV could be delivered by all of them, infor- end. Recently, with the rapid progress of mation expansion makes our world in need of advanced signal processing technologies, next- more powerful DTTB systems capable of pro- generation DTTB systems like Digital Video viding more types of services more efficiently Broadcasting-Terrestrial-Second Generation and reliably [2]. Thanks to the rapid progress (DVB-T2) have been extensively studied and of advanced modern signal processing tech- developed to provide more types of services with nologies, next-generation DTTB systems have higher spectral efficiency and better perfor- been extensively studied and developed to ful- mance. This article starts from the brief review fill those requirements [3, 4]. of the first-generation DTTB standards and the It is significant to inform people from both current status of emerging second-generation academia and industry of the principles and key DTTB systems, then focuses on the common key technologies of those emerging systems. There- technologies behind them instead of describing fore, rather than discussing the specific tech- the specific techniques adopted by various stan- niques adopted by various standards, this article dards. The state-of-the-art, technical challenges, seeks to generalize the typical and common key and the most recent achievements in the field technologies for next-generation DTTB systems, are addressed. The future research trends are including the discussion about their current sta- discussed as well. In addition, the scheme of tus, technical challenges, and more importantly, integrating DTTB and Internet is proposed to the future research trends. solve the crucial problem of information expan- The remainder of this article is organized as sion. follows: we briefly review first-generation DTTB standards already deployed worldwide at first. INTRODUCTION Then, we outline the current development of next-generation DTTB systems, whose key tech- Digital television terrestrial broadcasting nologies and research trends are discussed later. (DTTB) system could realize the revolutionary Finally, conclusions are drawn. technology of high definition television (HDTV) with the quasi error free (QEF) per- formance at the bit error rate (BER) as low as REVIEW OF FIRST-GENERATION –12 10 , which means that the uncorrectable TANDARDS error is less than one during one hour’s contin- DTTB S uous transmission of 5 Mb/s data stream [1]. The general DTTB system architecture is shown After International Telecommunications Union in Fig. 1. Currently, there are four first-genera- (ITU) approved the fourth DTTB standard tion international DTTB standards approved by called Digital Television/Terrestrial Multime- ITU, namely, ATSC, DVB-T, ISDB-T, and dia Broadcasting (DTMB) in December 2011, DTMB. Although they share similar system there are currently four international DTTB architecture, different technical features could standards [1]: the one recommended by be found. 150 0163-6804/12/$25.00 © 2012 IEEE IEEE Communications Magazine • June 2012 DAI LAYOUT_Layout 1 5/22/12 5:23 PM Page 151 Broadcasting Program antenna After the deploy- Video stream Video Transport ment and successful coding stream Audio application of various Program stream Modulation DTTB systems, novel Audio and channel advanced signal pro- coding coding cessing technologies Program layer Transport Data stream are continuously Transmitter emerging. Mean- Application while, people are server demanding more Radio broadcasting channel powerful DTTB sys- tems with higher data rate and more Data and Program reliable performance. instructions stream Transport Middleware stream Program Demodulation Video stream and channel Video decoding decoding User Program antenna Audio stream layer Transport Audio Digital TV decoding applications Receiver Figure 1. System architecture of typical DTTB systems. ATSC ISDB-T has two major improvements. First, the interleaver with longer depth is used to improve As the first DTTB standard proposed by ATSC the mobile reception performance. Second, the of the U.S. in September 1995, ATSC adopts key technology called bandwidth segmented trans- single-carrier transmission technology. It has mission OFDM (BST-OFDM) enables ISDB-T been deployed in the U.S., Canada, Korea and the capability of supporting multiple services. other five countries. The original design goal of ASTC is only to realize outdoor fixed HDTV DTMB reception over the 6 MHz channel at the data Formally launched by China in August 2006, rate of 19.39 Mb/s. Although its transmitter DTMB has been adopted by China (including power is low, due to the high complexity as well Hong Kong and Macao), Laos, Cambodia, and as the error propagation of the decision feed- Cuba. The key technology of DTMB is the novel back equalization, ASTC is sensitive to multi- multi-carrier transmission scheme called time path fading channels, and it is difficult to support domain synchronous OFDM (TDS-OFDM), mobile reception. which uses a known pseudorandom noise (PN) sequence instead of cyclic prefix (CP) as the DVB-T guard interval between consecutive data blocks Announced by ETSI in March 1997, DVB-T is to achieve higher spectral efficiency and faster the most popular DTTB standard widely adopted synchronization [5]. DTMB also adopts the pow- by more than 60 countries. Its core technology is erful low-density parity-check (LDPC) code cas- the coded orthogonal frequency division multi- caded by Bose-Chaudhuri-Hocquengham (BCH) plexing (OFDM) multi-carrier transmission with code to further improve the system performance. excellent capability of combating wireless multi- DTMB could provide the data rate up to 32.49 path channels. DVB-T could support indoor and Mb/s within the 8 MHz signal bandwidth. outdoor fixed reception, as well as portable and Table 1 summarizes the main system parame- mobile services over the 8 MHz channel at the ters of those four DTTB standards. date rate ranging from 4.98 to 31.67 Mb/s. ISDB-T CURRENT STATUS OF NEXT- ISDB-T developed by Japan in May 1999 is ENERATION YSTEMS mainly applied in Japan, Brazil, Peru and other G DTTB S Central and South American countries. ISDB-T After the deployment and successful applica- can be deemed as a derivative of DVB-T because tion of various DTTB systems, novel advanced of their similar technical features and system signal processing technologies are continuous- parameters. However, compared with DVB-T, ly emerging. Meanwhile, people are demand- IEEE Communications Magazine • June 2012 151 DAI LAYOUT_Layout 1 5/22/12 5:23 PM Page 152 ATSC DVB-T ISDB-T DTMB Applicable Standard A.52/A.53 EN 300 744 ARIB STD-B31 GB 20600-2006 System Bandwidth 6 MHz 6, 7, and 8 MHz Source Coding MPEG-2 transport stream Transmission Coded OFDM with 2k BST-OFDM with 2k, 4k TDS-OFDM with 3780 FFT size + Single Carrier Scheme and 8k FFT size and 8k FFT size Single Carrier Guard Interval — 1/32, 1/16, 1/8 and 1/4 1/4 (PN945), 1/7 (PN595), 1/9 (PN420) Rate 2/3 trellis code + Punctured convolutional 1/2, 2/3, 3/4, 5/6, 7/8 + LDPC(7488, 3008/4512/6016) + Channel Coding RS(207,187, t = 10) codes with code rate RS(204,188, t = 8) BCH(762, 752) QPSK, 16QAM and DQPSK, QPSK,16QAM, QPSK, 4QAM-NR,16QAM,32QAM and Modulation Scheme 8-VSB 64QAM and 64QAM 64QAM 12 to 1 trellis code Bit-wise interleaver+ Bit-wise interleaver + time Interleaver Convolutional interleaver Interleaver symbol interleaver and frequency interleaver Data Rate 19.39 Mb/s 4.98–31.67 Mb/s 3.65–23.23 Mb/s 4.81–32.49 Mb/s Table 1. Main system parameters of DTTB standards. ing more powerful DTTB systems with higher orthogonal spreading sequences with the power data rate and more reliable performance. of –30 dB on TV signals without affecting the Around 2000, the research work for next-gen- normal TV program reception, ATSC-M/H eration DTTB standards was started world- could provide the capability of wireless localiza- wide, and recently three systems have been tion. announced [3]. ISDB-TMM DVB-T2 In July 2010, Japan’s new-generation DTTB In September 2009, ETSI formally announced standard named ISDB for Terrestrial multi- the new-generation DTTB standard called media broadcasting (ISDB-Tmm) was DVB-Terrestrial-Second Generation (DVB-T2), announced. ISDB-Tmm is highly compatible whose updated version optimized for mobile with ISDB-T. ISDB-Tmm could provide a vari- reception was introduced in April 2012 [4]. ety of interactive services by improving the exist- Based on but not compatible with its preceding ing “one-segment”