A study on advanced single frequency network technology using STC-SDM transmission

We have been conducting research on a transmission system using ultra-multilevel orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) technology and dual-polarized multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) technology based on the digital terrestrial broadcasting signal format, ISDB-T. As a technology of a single frequency network (SFN) for the next-generation of digital broadcasting, we studied a space time coding (STC) - space division multiplexing (SDM) transmission in which STC and dual-polarized MIMO-OFDM are used together. In this paper, we studied a scattered pilot (SP) scheme for the channel estimation in STC-SDM transmission and the coding schemes. Computer simulations confirmed the advantages of STC-SDM transmission compared with the conventional SFN scheme in environments in which the desired to undesired signal ratio (D/U) is low. We also show the results that STC-SDM transmission with space time block coding (STBC) and space frequency block coding (SFBC) has the same characteristics as transmissions under fixed reception conditions.