Design of rotated QAM mapper/demapper for the DVB-T2 standard

Signal space diversity (SSD) has been lately adopted into the second generation of the terrestrial digital video broadcasting standard DVB-T2. While spectrally efficient, SSD improves the performance of QAM constellations over fading channels thanks to an increased diversity. In this paper, flexible mapper and demapper architectures for DVB-T2 standard are detailed. A detection based on the decomposition of the constellation into two-dimensional sub-regions in signal space associated to an algorithmic simplification constitute the main novelty of this work. They enable to strongly decrease the complexity of the demapper. The design and the FPGA prototyping of the resultant architecture are then described. Low architecture complexity and measured performance demonstrate the efficiency of the detection method.