Antenna diversity for DVB-S2 mobile services in railway environments

This paper evaluates the applicability of the DVB-S2 standard in railway environments, where the most peculiar impairment is the periodic deep fading caused by power-supply arches distributed along the rail tracks. This effect induces a link loss every time the train antenna undergoes a power arch and cannot be counteracted with transmission power. Therefore, we propose and investigate the use of antenna diversity on the train. Simulation and semi-analytical results show that second-order diversity suffices to remove the packet error floor observed in the case of a single receiving antenna, thus enabling the application of DVBS2 to this harsh environment. Copyright # 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.