Front-end signal to noise ratio estimation for DVBT fixed reception in flat-fading channel

Signal to Noise Ratio (SNR) is a communication link quality evaluation indicator. The Digital Video Broadcasting-Terrestrial (DVB-T) is a European, pilot symbol assisted (PSA), wireless standard for broadcasting digital TV content. The DVB-T receiver is faced by the wireless environment challenges that lead to fluctuation in the received SNR level. In this paper we focus on estimating the DVB-T received signal´s SNR for flat-fading channel scenario. We use the auto-correlation function (ACF) to estimate the total received signal plus noise power. The received signal-only power is estimated by cross-correlating the received signal with a locally generated version of the pilots. The algorithm is expressed in time domain (Pre-FFT), i.e. receiver front-end. The results of the proposed algorithm show that the algorithm can successfully work for a relatively wide range of SNRs. We use the Mean Square Error as statistical standard for measuring the deviation.