Multi Antenna Techniques for Digital Video Broadcasting (DVB) Systems

In this paper we describe the potential of multi-antenna techniques (MIMO) in the context of digital video broadcasting (DVB) systems. DVB standards have been challenged by the increasing demand of high data rate applications and larger indoor coverage area. MIMO is a key technology to increase the system capacity and link reliability without any additional bandwidth or transmit signal power. The Mobile Communications Group of iTEAM research institute has been actively participating in the standardization process of the next generation of mobile TV broadcasting DVB-NGH (digital video broadcasting – next generation handheld) for the validation of the various MIMO signaling techniques. In this paper, we describe the benefits in the utilization of MIMO and its application to DVB standards, i.e. DVB-NGH and DVB-T2 (Terrestrial 2nd generation). Following a description of the transmission techniques adopted for the DVB-NGH specification, we furthermore provide theoretical and physical layer simulation results to illustrate the performance gains of MIMO in various channel models.