Analysis of Channel Uncertainty on OFDM/FBMC DVB-T2 Simulations

DVB-T2 is the second generation of terrestrial broadcasting standard widely adopted or deployed in Europe and Africa. During the network planning, the channel propagation is the challenging element for broadcasters. As it is known to be probabilistic, many methods are used to predict or evaluate the channel Power Delay Profile (PDP). The measurement method is the one used in the field trials to record the PDP at several locations and to evaluate the channel profile. Obviously, measurement errors occur on the PDP recorded values leading to the system performance evaluation flaw. Also, 5G candidate waveform Filtered Bank Multicarrier (FBMC) has been previously proposed as an alternative to Cyclic Prefix - Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (CP-OFDM) in DVB-T2 system to increase the spectral efficiency and to improve the minimum Signal to Noise Ratio required for reception. This work analyses the channel uncertainty in the simulation of native DVB-T2 and enhanced FBMC based DVB-T2 systems transmission performance using a channel PDP from field measurement in Belgium. This paper shows that uncertainties values tolerable for a good signal quality, using the quasi error-free (QEF) criteria are between 0.1 dB and 0.5 dB and between 10 and 50 ns, respectively in power and delay. Moreover, it provides details about uncertainty values predictable for FBMC based DVB-T2 case which is known to be 133% spectrally efficient compared to the 100% of native DVB-T2.