TV 3.0 Geographical Segmentation by Over-the-air Physical Layer

Geographical Segmentation is one of the requirements of TV 3.0. The new generation of Brazilian Digital Terrestrial Television Broadcasting (DTTB) uses a Physical Layer (PL) based on the Advanced Television Systems Committee (ATSC) 3.0 for the Over-The-Air (OTA) with Multiple-Input Multiple-Output (MIMO), Transmitter Identification (TxID) and Layered Division Multiplexing (LDM), also known as ATSC 3.0 - MIMO Extensions (A/322). The main idea of geographical segmentation is to transmit wide-ranging content on a Physical Layer Pipe (PLP) using the Single-Frequency Network (SFN) technique and on another PLP a regionalized content, which allows users in a specific region to have access to a local program. Some techniques, such as LDM, Time-Division Multiplexing (TDM), Frequency-Division Multiplexing (FDM), and their combination, can be used so that each transmitter in the SFN network sends both types of content. This paper presents laboratory test results of Geographic Segmented Localcasting (GSL) in a SFN with LDM. During the tests, the protection ratios were measured considering an SFN network with two transmitters with the same transmission power and, for this reason, delays of 1 and 5 µs were added between the two transmitters to emulate a real system operating condition. This paper presents the first hardware-based GSL reception performance using LDM/MIMO under the A/322 standard. This meaningful technical achievement demonstrates the practical feasibility of GSL reception, moving beyond simulations to real-world validation.