Practical evaluation of LTE-800 and DVB-T coexistence

The recent analog-to-digital switchover and the release of the upper UHF bands for LTE services, as part of the Digital Dividend 1, has led to coexistence issues between the LTE-800 and DVB-T technologies. This is a significant problem especially for the DTT service degradation, since the DTT receivers are still manufactured to receive signals in the upper UHF bands. Therefore, the regulatory bodies have been particularly active in this area performing tests and deriving the DTT service protection ratios for different types of commercial receivers. This paper builds on the regulatory activities, using a demo evaluation comprising USRP2 based implementation of an LTE-like signal generator, DVB-T transmitter and receiver and video encoder, to numerically and experimentally derive the DTT protection ratios. The performance analyses consider different LTE transmission configurations in terms of transmit/receive power, bandwidth and DTT frequency proximity. The obtained results also prove the feasibility of the USRP2 hardware for LTE emulation in practical DTT degradation evaluation scenarios.