Assessment of Interference to the DTT Service Generated by LTE Signals on Existing Head Amplifiers of Collective Distribution Systems: A Real Case Study

The increasing market interest for broadband services led the World Radiocommunication Conference (WRC-07) to allocate the upper part of the UHF band (the so called “digital dividend”) to mobile services. The coexistence of broadcasting and mobile telephony services, i.e., long-term evolution (LTE) in contiguous frequency bands can generate interferences to the reception of digital terrestrial television (DTT) signals; in particular, in the case of collective antenna systems, there is the risk of saturation of the wideband head-end distribution amplifier, due to the high level of the new LTE signals. This paper analyzes such situation in a real environment by means of extensive computer simulations and exploits specific techniques that must be adopted to mitigate such interference.