Reception Quality Prediction in a Single Frequency Network for the DTMB Standard

Single frequency network (SFN) is an attractive scheme for the digital television terrestrial broadcasting (DTTB) coverage with efficient utilization of the spectral resources. In this paper, a method featuring low complexity and low workload is proposed to estimate the reception quality under the SFN environment with the maximum delay spread of the artificial multipath no longer than the guard interval. Based on the analysis of error probability and channel capacity, this method supports an unambiguous prediction of the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) threshold according to the parameters of received signals, which is thus meaningful for system evaluation. We applied this method to the digital television/terrestrial multimedia broadcasting (DTMB) systems, and carried out the laboratory measurements for performance verification. The predicted results show a satisfactory match with the measured results, validating the accuracy and effectiveness of the proposed method.