DVB-T/H and T-DMB: Physical Layer Performance Comparison in Fast Mobile Channels

Terrestrial or Handheld Digital Video Broadcasting (DVB-T/H) and Terrestrial Digital Multimedia Broadcasting (T-DMB) are two popular broadcasting standards that enable digital television transmissions to handheld receivers. This paper presents a comprehensive performance comparison between the physical layers of DVB-T/H and T-DMB when employed for mobile communications. By exploiting a recently proposed fast simulation model, we assess the BER of the two coded OFDM systems in several realistic scenarios, taking into account Rayleigh and Rice channels, different mobile speeds, inner and outer channel coding, channel estimation, and one or two receive antennas. Our comparison shows that the DVB-T/H physical layer performance highly depends on the delay spread of the channel, whereas T-DMB is less sensitive to the frequency selectivity of the channel. As a result, DVB-T/H yields better performance than T-DMB in typical Rayleigh channels with significant delay spread. On the contrary, at high SNR, T-DMB outperforms DVB-T/H in Rice channels with low delay spread. As a side result, we show the performance improvement of DVB-H produced by MPE-FEC at the data link layer.