A New Positioning System Using DVB-T2 Transmitter Signature Waveforms in Single Frequency Networks

A new positioning system using transmitter signature waveforms of DVB-T2 in Single Frequency Networks (SFNs) is proposed in this paper. Due to the wide coverage of the SFN and extremely high transmission power of digital television (DTV) transmitting stations, positioning based on DTV SFN can be considered as a promising complementary to remedy the poor coverage of the Global Positioning System (GPS) in dense multipath propagation environments. Based on the newly proposed transmitter signature waveform in DVB-T2 systems, transmitter identification and timing estimation using threshold-based first path detection method are jointly achieved, and subsequently utilized for Time-Difference-of-Arrival (TDOA)-based positioning approach. The proposed positioning system is fully compatible with the current DVB-T2 standard and therefore, no dedicated hardware modification is required. The performance of the proposed positioning system is evaluated through computer simulations under different signal propagation scenarios and compared with existing methods. Simulation results show that very high accuracy can be obtained with the proposed positioning system.