Radio channel models laboratory comparative study for the L-band DAB/DMB system

This paper presents the performance results of multipath fading characterizations performed in the laboratory with a single and dual-antenna DAB/DMB software receiver, using a sophisticated hardware channel simulator (Propsim FE). Different radio channel models corresponding to various scenarios and environments (urban, suburban, indoor, outdoor, SFN) have been tested and compared. For a single antenna scenario, it is shown that for the same environments, the COST207 and 3GPP channel models offer almost a similar performance. Moreover, it is found that in the case of indoor channel reception (WLAN profiles) and for a carrier to noise ratio (C/N) of 15-20 dB, the receiver maintains an acceptable level of pcBER for proper audio decoding. This observation also applies to the recently proposed DVB-H multipath channel profiles, except for the motorway rural channel (MR) at 100 km/h where the receiver fails to operate correctly at this mobile speed. In dual-antenna scenarios, the maximal ratio combining (MRC) diversity technique provides a clear improvement to the performance of the dual-antenna based DAB/DMB receiver for all multipath channel profiles tested. Finally, it is shown that DAB/DMB transmission with a simple delay diversity scheme can be effective to mitigate multipath flat fading degradation.