Proposal and Hardware Performance of an Enhanced Feature Detection Method for OFDM Signals of Digital TV Standards

This paper proposes an enhanced feature detection method for the OFDM signals of digital TV (DTV) standards, namely Digital Video Broadcasting-Terrestrial (DVB-T) and Integrated Services Digital Broadcasting-Terrestrial (ISDB-T). The proposed method exploits property of time-domain sliding correlation results of DTV signals with the pilots that are inserted into OFDM symbols. Some correlation outputs are much larger than the remaining outputs and are called correlation peaks here, and, the distance between their positions in the correlation output sequence keep constant regardless of the received DTV timings. The proposed method then derives sensing test statistic with improved SNR by aggregating the correlation peaks based on their positions. Performance of the proposed method is evaluated by both computer simulation and hardware implementation. Simulation results for DVB-T detection verify that compared to the optimal conventional sensing method, the proposed method achieves superior sensing performance. It reduces sampling time by about 25% for the same sensing performance while increasing computational complexity by around 0.0001%. Hardware performance further verifies that the proposed method is able to accurately detect ISDB-T at the low SNR of -14.5 dB by employing 8 OFDM symbol durations of samples.