Obtaining Diversity and Coding Gains for Digital Terrestrial Television by Using a Coded Cooperative MIMO Transmission Scheme

Digital terrestrial television is a modern broadcasting technology that has permitted broadcasters to offer television service with excellent image and sound quality. Many countries have been assigned a new digital television standardization process and many studies are underway regarding digital multimedia broadcasting technology. This paper investigates the utilization of a coded cooperative multiple-input and multiple-output (MIMO) transmission scheme in modern digital broadcasting systems to achieve additional transmit diversity and coding gains. The main idea of this work is the implementation of a coded cooperative MIMO scheme based on a low-density parity check code. A coded cooperative transmission can obtain a robust forward error correction. In this way, it is possible to achieve more stable system performance and improved mobility for next generation handheld systems. In order to show the potential for practical implementation, the performance of the proposed method is evaluated on the basis of the Digital Video Broadcasting-Second Generation Terrestrial (DVB-T2) system. The simulation results show that the proposed scheme can be utilized for the development of future DVB broadcasting systems that should support high mobility handheld devices, such as the Digital Video Broadcasting–Next Generation Handheld (DVB–NGH) system.