VQ Digital Video Transmission through Coaxial Cable using OFDM

Transmission of high definition digital video (HDTV) by satellite, cable (CATV), and optical networks is an area of intense activity, specially in Europe and North America, where the main challenge is to increase the number of TV channels in the assigned spectrum. In this paper, OFDM modulation is studied for HDTV transmission on a 6 MHz bandwidth channel by using coaxial cable as a transmission medium. Attenuation, phase shift and propagation time are considered, as well as the prevailing degradations on CATV: thermal noise and crosstalk. We compress the video source information in terms of the Vector Quantization (VQ) technique, which is found to be very robust against channel errors. According to our results, we give some recommendations about the design of the filters required in the system and the minimum frequency guard bands between adjacent channels.