Network Planning for DTTB Systems

This chapter discusses the issues of coverage and network planning of DTV terrestrial broadcasting networks and gives a detailed introduction of single-frequency networks (SFNs). For analog TV signal transmission, distortion due to nonperfect channel and system nonlinearity always exists, while in DTTB systems, these errors might be corrected by FEC, and the original information bit sequence can be correctly restored. When broadcasting network planning is performed, the position of the transmitter is determined based on certain criteria, such as the largest possible population coverage, the minimum cochannel interference, environmental factors, and economic factors. Also, the interference from the DTTB system to analog TV services should be less than the mutual interference among analog TV systems. Some countries have decided to offset the center frequency of DTV signals to reduce the impact from the analog signals when doing DTTB system frequency planning.