Filtered Based UFMC Waveform Applied on Joint DVB-T2/NUC System

The Digital Video Broadcasting-Terrestrial, second generation (DVB-T2) system is now mature and being deployed worldwide in direct deployment or in replacement of Digital Video Broadcasting-Terrestrial, first generation (DVB-T). Nevertheless, attempts to improve its performance in terms of distance to Shannon limit, Bit Error Rate (BER), Signal to Noise Ratio (SNR) or coverage are still reported in the literature. On the one hand, the authors of this paper recently reported that Universal Filtered MultiCarrier (UFMC) is, among 5G waveforms, the best compromise in terms of improvement, spectrum efficiency and complexity for the replacement of Cyclic Prefix - Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (CP-OFDM) in DVB-T2 system. On the other hand, a gain in DVB-T2 performance in Additive White Gaussian Noise and Rayleigh environments was reported in the literature using optimized Non Uniform Constellations (2D-NUCs). This paper first focuses on the maximum obtainable performance improvement of DVB-T2 CP-OFDM with NUCs in Typical Urban 6 (TU6) environment. It concentrates afterwards on the ultimate gain achievable using joint UFMC and NUCs in DVB-T2. TU6 channel is defined in DVB-T2 standard as a generic channel used in simulation to emulate an urban propagation environment. In these conditions, a gain of \({0.5}\,\mathrm{dB}\) (for BER = \(3.10^{-3}\)) is reported in TU6 using CP-OFDM NUC 32K 256-QAM and Code Rate (CR) = 1/2 and 3/5 in place of sole CP-OFDM. Also, using both technologies in conjunction, namely UFMC NUC 32K 256-QAM CR = 1/2 and 3/5, a gain of \({1.2}\,\mathrm{dB}\) (for BER = \(3.10^{-3}\)) is achievable which provides a good SNR margin e.g. to increase the emitter’s coverage.