Deterministic equalization and results of a DVB-T multipath equalizer for both 16-QAM and 64-QAM operation

Developments in the UK concerning the reception of digital terrestrial television (DTT) have indicated that, as it currently stands, DVB-T receivers may not be sufficient to maintain adequate quality of digital picture information to the consumer. There are many possible reasons why such large errors are being introduced into the system preventing reception failure. It has been suggested that one possibility is that the assumptions concerning the immunity to multipath that coded orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (COFDM) is expected to have, may not be entirely accurate. Previous research has shown that multipath can indeed have an impact on a DVB-T receiver performance. In the UK, proposals have been made to change the modulation from 64-QAM to 16-QAM to improve the immunity to multipath, but this paper demonstrates that the 16-QAM performance may again not be sufficient. To this end, this paper presents a deterministic approach to equalization such that a 64-QAM receiver with the simple equalizer presented has the same order of MPEG-2 BER performance as that of a 16QAM receiver without equalization. Thus, alleviating the requirement in the broadcasters to migrate from 64-QAM to 16-QAM of course, by adding the equalizer to a 16-QAM receiver then the BER is also further improved and thus creating one more step to satisfying the consumers.