A Robust Symbol Synchronization Method for Terrestrial-DMB Receivers in Hierarchical Modulation Mode

Recently, hierarchical modulation has been considered as a way to increase the payload data in terrestrial digital multimedia broadcasting (T-DMB) transmission systems. This paper proposes a robust symbol synchronization method for T-DMB receivers operating in hierarchical modulation mode. It adopts a timing error detector which produces a timing phase error at the OFDM symbol rate instead of the frame rate. This method thus results in the robust synchronization of symbol timing in the presence of a sampling frequency offset (SFO). The simulation results show that the proposed method outperforms the conventional one, especially at a large SFO.