Improved Bootstrap Design for Frequency-Domain Signaling Transmission

In ATSC 3.0, a bootstrap is used to enable initial synchronization and carry transmission parameter signaling. The bootstrap consists of multiple orthogonal frequency division multiplexing symbols which enables variable signaling capacity. Signaling information is conveyed by applying cyclic shift in time-domain. However, the bootstrap suffers from performance loss in the channels of strong multipath and fast time-variation. In this paper, an improved bootstrap enabling separate design of synchronization part and signaling transmission part is proposed. Zero correlation zone sequence is employed in frequency-domain (FD) for signaling transmission by cyclically shifting the sequence in FD. At the receiver, a universal signaling decoding method regardless of the synchronization part design is presented. Besides, to eliminate the performance degradation introduced by non-linear distortion of channel transfer function, signaling validation and correction operations on the previous symbol are required. Numerical simulation indicates that the proposed design achieves better signaling transmission performance than current one in some corner cases.