Performance of the Viterbi decoder for DVB-T in Rayleigh fading channels

We present the performance of the Viterbi decoder using the soft decision method for the European digital video broadcasting for terrestrial (DVB-T) specification in Rayleigh fading channels. We investigate the bit error rate (BER) performance of the Viterbi decoder for hard and soft decisions in terms of the decoding depth and the number of allocated bits for the soft decision. We also consider the decoder performance in the Doppler shift. The simulation results show that the Viterbi decoder with 5-bit decision and the decoding depth of 55 is a sub-optimum decoder.