A novel three-stage ATSC TxID identifier for robust data broadcasting

With the recent development of digital television (DTV) broadcasting, the total number of deployed DTV transmitters is increasing in an unprecedented way. Therefore, transmitter identification (TxID) has been considered as an important feature in the ATSC standard for distributed transmission as it enables the broadcast authorities and operators to identify the source of interference or any illegal transmitter operating in a particular region. However, identification of the TxID sequence is a challenging issue due to the complexity offered by the conventional detection algorithm which is based on exhaustive search method or matched filter detection. In this paper, we propose to use a three-stage identification scheme which offers the same performance as the optimal matched filter but with significantly reduced implementation complexity. Design of this three-stage identifier is presented and corresponding complexity in terms of the computation and hardware implementation is also analyzed. The performance of the proposed three-stage approach are investigated and verified through the simulations in different channel scenarios. It is found from the simulation results that proposed identifier can provide reliable identification of DTV transmitters in large broadcast scenarios with significantly reduced hardware and computational complexity.