Robust Frame Synchronization for Chinese DTTB System

Digital terrestrial multimedia/television broadcasting (DTMB), which is the recently released Chinese digital television terrestrial broadcasting (DTTB) standard, uses guard intervals padded with known pseudo-noise (PN) sequences for multi-carrier or single-carrier block transmission. Well designed synchronization algorithms are a prerequisite for achieving high-quality multimedia transmission. In this paper, a novel frame synchronization technique, which is robust to carrier frequency offset (CFO), is proposed for DTMB systems. This technique is derived through segmenting the local PN sequence into M contiguous blocks and performing multiple cross-correlations with the received signal. The metric for peak detection is defined as the non-coherent summation of the M cross-correlation magnitude outputs. Moreover, a low-complexity frame synchronizer based on segment-based full correlation for PN420 mode in DTMB system is proposed. It is shown through computer simulation that the proposed techniques generally outperform the conventional ones when CFO occurs, over both AWGN and frequency-selective fading channels. For a DTMB system using PN420 mode, the maximal allowed CFO to keep system still working normally of our proposed schemes are more than 3 times larger than that of the conventional method.