Improving the Reception Performance of Legacy T-DMB/DAB Receivers in a Single-Frequency Network with Delay Diversity

This paper describes a simple delay diversity technique for terrestrial digital multimedia broadcasting (T-DMB) and digital audio broadcasting in a single-frequency network (SFN). For the diversity technique, a delay diversity scheme is adopted. In the delay diversity scheme, a non-delayed signal is transmitted in the first antenna, and delayed versions of the signal are transmitted in each additional antenna. For an SFN environment with multiple transmitters, delay diversity can be executed by controlling the emission times of the transmitters. This SFN delay diversity scheme does not require any hardware changes in either the transmitter or receiver, and perfect backward compatibility can be acquired. To evaluate the performance improvement, laboratory tests are executed with various types of commercial T-DMB receivers as well as a measurement receiver. The improvement in the bit error rate performance is evaluated using a measurement receiver, and an improvement of the threshold of visibility value is evaluated for commercial receivers. Test results show that the T-DMB system can obtain diversity gain using the described technique.