A Channel Equalization Method Using Spline Interpolation for Mobile Reception in Digital Television Terrestrial Broadcasting

In this paper, we evaluate the channel equalization performance of digital television terrestrial broadcasting for mobile reception. To improve reception performance under serious fading environments, high-order interpolation for precise channel estimation is required. However, these high-order interpolation methods generally need an immense amount of temporal memory. To reduce the required memory, we propose a new channel estimation method using spline interpolation. From the results of computational simulation, we show that our system improves the carrier to noise ratio (CNR) to 1.7 dB better than the conventional method using linear interpolation with the maximum Doppler frequency of 50 Hz at quasi-error free (QEF), by adding slight memory. Moreover, we have developed a FPGA- based prototype system which has shown good reception performance through vehicular experiments in outdoor fields.