Timing-offset compensation techniques in ATSC DTV receivers

This paper presents symbol timing-offset compensation techniques to improve the reception performance of ATSC DTV receivers. Short and long echoes could induce timing-offset in the symbol timing recovery circuit. The timing-offset shifts sampling instant and causes the performance degradation of the equalizer. When many echoes exist, the optimal sampling instant is the point at which the main-path has a peak value. With a simple correlation technique, we find the optimal sampling instant and compensate the timing-offset with poly-phase filter. Simulation results show that the proposed timing-offset compensation techniques could give considerable enhancements in terms of symbol error rates.