Low-Complexity and Robust Symbol Timing Synchronization Scheme for MIMO DVB-T2 Systems

The digital video broadcasting-terrestrial-second generation (DVB-T2) system provides the so-called P1 symbol as preamble for the fast synchronization tasks. In this paper, a simple and robust timing synchronization scheme for a multiple-input multiple-output orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (MIMO-OFDM)-based DVB-T2 system is proposed to improve the initial time and frequency synchronization performance. In doing so, the proposed synchronization scheme utilizes a decimated correlation for the P1 symbol timing detection, thus producing a sharper peak timing detection metric. A new timing detection metric can help the proposed scheme to be robust against frequency-selective fading. It is found that the proposed synchronization scheme works well with a reduced computational complexity and outperforms the conventional estimation scheme.