Transmit diversity for terrestrial broadcast systems

For terrestrial television two television standards exist: The DVB-T standard is currently widely deployed and used in more than 35 countries worldwide. The second one is the emerging standard DVB-T2. It is a revised standard which offers a higher spectral efficiency and requires multiple transmit antennas. DVB-T2 promises performance gains because of improved coding, modulation and multiple antenna technologies. Alamouti Space-Frequency coding in DVB-T2 provides additional frequency diversity, especially in multipath propagation environments. In this paper we describe in a generalized way phase transmit diversity techniques, like CDD and PD. The generalized approach allows to describe both variants, discontinuous and continuous techniques. Furthermore, we investigate achievable diversity gains, which can achieved by the application of the diversity techniques the DVB-T2 standard offers in addition to standard conformable transmit antenna technologies.