COFDM for digital ATV terrestrial distribution over 6 MHz channels

In the United States, the Grand Alliance has selected a single carrier modulation scheme, 8 level vestigial sideband (8-VSB), for digital advanced television (ATV) terrestrial broadcasting within a 6 MHz channel. In Europe, on the other hand, the Digital Video Broadcasting (DVB) project has chosen a multi-carrier modulation scheme, Coded Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (COFDM), for terrestrial distribution over 8 MHz channels. The Communications Research Centre (CRC) conducted analytical studies and computer simulations to compare the two schemes. Furthermore, CRC is participating in the work of American, Canadian, and Brazilian broadcasters for evaluating the performance of a 6 MHz COFDM transmission system for terrestrial ATV distribution. The studies, which are reported in this paper, involved the determination of appropriate parameters sets of COFDM for operation in North America such as channel coding, data throughput, carrier spacing, and guard interval duration. Possibilities of a single frequency network operation are also examined