ATSC terrestrial digital television broadcasting using single frequency networks

In this paper, we propose an efficient method to broadcast digital television signals using single frequency networks (SFNs) within the Advanced Television Systems Committee (ATSC) transmission systems. In implementing the SFNs of an 8-vestigial side band (8-VSB) Digital Television (DTV) system, the ambiguity problem of the trellis coder is unavoidable in a conventional ATSC transmission system. We propose a memory initialization of the trellis coder to resolve this ambiguity problem. Since the proposed scheme to synchronize multiple transmitters minimizes the changes from the conventional ATSC system, the hardware complexity for these changes is very low. Our simulation results show that the proposed scheme makes a less than 0.1 dB degradation at the threshold of visibility with a bit error rate of 3x10(-6) in the additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN) channel. It is possible to reduce the performance degradation by increasing the initialization period of the proposed scheme.