ATSC 3.0 Transmitter Identification Signals and Applications

In the ATSC 3.0 PHY layer standard, a transmitter identification (TxID) signal is defined in order to provide the identification of an ATSC 3.0 transmitter. TxID signal can also be used to find the co-channel and adjacent interference signals, to assist accurate location finding calculation, and to obtain the channel estimation for each transmitter, which can help local service (e.g., targeted advertisement) reception, as well as for emergency alert. For efficient use of spectrum and quality of service improvement, single frequency network (SFN) where all transmitters share a single RF channel is often implemented. The recently developed ATSC 3.0 physical layer standard has been designed to support SFN. For efficient designing, fine-tuning and operating an SFN, it is crucial to identify each transmitter, as well as to adjust transmitting power and emission time of each transmitter. This paper presents TxID for ATSC 3.0, and analyzes its detection performance under very low signal to noise ratio environments and other applications, such as location finding, and channel estimation etc. for each SFN transmitter.