Joint encoding/decoding enhanced multi-streams vestigial side band transmission (E-VSB) for North-American single carrier HDTV terrestrial broadcast

A new enhanced VSB (E-VSB) transmission system has been proposed to improve the North-American HDTV terrestrial broadcast. The system allows better reception for portable, mobile, and indoor receivers, by means of two backward compatible robust and scalable data stream, so-called 1/2 rate and 1/4 rate, that can co-exist with the normal stream. One originality of the system lies in the possibility for the receiver to enhance the normal transmission mode by combining the information provided by the two robust streams to improve cancellation of channel multipath. The improvement of the main service depends on the coding mechanism used for the enhanced streams and the number and the position of the enhanced symbols in the VSB frame. We illustrate the coding and the normal/enhanced packet multiplexing mechanisms that are used to achieve this goal.