Transport Stream Analysis of a ISDB-T Signal Using an Embedded and Reconfigurable System

Quality management is an important criterion to evaluate broadcaster´s transmission system integrity, which can be affected by radiofrequency signal impairments and by coding, multiplexing, and/or modulation errors. The international system integrated services digital broadcasting - terrestrial (ISDB-T) was designed to provide a reliable reception, even with interferences inherent to radio wave propagation. However, channel noise, as well as problems in the transmission system, may corrupt the transport stream (TS), causing image failures and, depending on the error level, even a complete loss of signal. This paper presents a supervisory system consisting of an ISDB-T front-end with spatial diversity of four branches, associated with a system-on-chip (SoC) board, in order to analyze the TS of any broadcaster, identifying transmission errors in real-time. The system continuously searches received data for impairments such as cyclic redundancy check - 32 and continuity counter errors, table/section intervals, and program clock reference jitter. The SoC comprises a field programmable gate array that includes a hard-wired processor, used to compute and show the analysis results.