Terrestrial network planning for digital video broadcasting to mobile receivers

The digital video broadcasting (DVB) standard offers data rates of several ten Mbit/s, using the MPEG-2 transport stream. These high data rates can be realized by cable networks (DVB-C) and by satellite transmission (DVB-S). The terrestrial DVB standard (DVB-T) has been designed to operate as a single frequency network (SFN), which means that only one frequency band is required over an arbitrarily large area. In the 8 MHz bandwidth of one analog television (TV) channel four to six digital TV programs can be stationary received with medium gain antennas in obscured line of sight (LOS) conditions. First measurement campaigns proved, that the reception for both, portable and mobile receivers is possible, but only under certain conditions. In this paper suitable parameter sets for mobile reception are determined and design rules for terrestrial transmitter networks are derived. The coverage criteria, minimum required field strength and maximum allowed bit error rate are analyzed. The results of this work are necessary to investigate whether existing transmitter locations can be used for future digital terrestrial video broadcasting networks and help to develop strategies for a SFN repeater operation.