Estimation Techniques for OFDM with application to Digital Video Broadcasting Standards

This thesis deals with three among the major tasks of a receiver designed for Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplex (OFDM): i) timing and frequency synchronization, ii) channel estimation and iii) data detection. These problems are very general, since OFDM is used in many different telecommunication environments, however the techniques involved are strongly dependent on the particular scenario. Here we focus on digital video broadcasting standards for terrestrial television. Terrestrial Digital Video Broadcasting, also known as DVB-T, is a broadcasting standard from the European consortium DVB. It is the most widely deployed Digital Terrestrial Television (DTT) system worldwide. The system is based on a transmission of an audio/video stream from the MPEG-2 family, using an OFDM modulation. Besides, in March 2006, the desire to improve the service quality as well as to increase the number of services and the power of the digital television system, has stimulated the DVB group to study some new options for an improved DVB-T standard. A call for technology has been published in 2007, followed in 2009 by the release of the standard for the new generation DVB-T, called DVB-T2. Deployment tests have been studied, and field tests show that DVB-T2, still based on OFDM, can guarantee a 30% increase of the system capacity with respect to its predecessor. As already stated, in both DVB-T standards the elected modulation scheme is OFDM. In fact, OFDM is widely used thanks to its low complexity structure allowing for simple demodulation and modulation by means of Fast Fourier ransform (FFT) and inverse FFT, respectively. The FFT algorithm is well optimized for computing blocks of samples with power of two sizes, i.e. 2048, 8096, etc. However, to allow simple equalization procedures and avoid interblock interference, a guard interval (GI) has to be appended to the OFDM block. GI reduces the efficiency of the transmission, because it is discarded at the receiver. The first part of this thesis proposes a receiver structure which takes advantage of the GI to improve data detection exploiting the redundancy of the signal. The performance of this structure is then analyzed comparing it with other two structures in a simulation scenario arisen from DVB-T2 reception configurations. The impact of low-density parity check codes (LDPC) which are part of the standard is also outlined. The second part of the thesis focuses on the channel estimation which is the basis for most of the signal processing techniques involved in the reception of an OFDM signal. In particular we focus on channel estimation using known pilot symbols. Transmission of pilot symbols on a sub-set of subcarriers in an orthogonal frequency division multiplexing system allows for an efficient channel estimation at the receiver by means of the Least-Square (LS) method. Usually, for these systems channel estimation is performed on pilots and then interpolated over the time and the frequency axis. We propose to improve the LS estimate on pilots by filtering the estimated channel both across the subcarriers and across different OFDM blocks, with adaptive filters in order to exploit the inter-carrier correlation and reduce the noise on the stimate. We consider various adaptive techniques to let the filter track the time-varying channel conditions: least mean square and Kalman filter theory are applied to design the finite impulse response filters. Besides, also infinite impulse response filters have been designed. Aim of the design is to obtain simple structures suitable for large FDM blocks and receivers with limited computational/memory resources, while still being adaptive to time-varying channel conditions. However, while most pproaches consider a single smoothing filter over time-interpolated estimates, i.e. after time interpolation, we propose the innovative use of multiple adaptive filters that take into account the different correlation among pilot estimates and interpolated estimates. In other words, we propose to design multiple adaptive frequency filters to perform frequency filtering in order to decrease the degree of noisiness of the time-interpolated samples. The idea is to leverage the fact that time-interpolated estimates have different reliability with respect to pilot LS estimates, and thus weighting accordingly the estimates during filtering, performance can be improved. Moreover, as a simpler approach we consider also the use of a single adaptive filter updated taking into account the reliability of the various estimates. Performance results are reported with reference to the DVB-T and DVB-T2 standards showing that the proposed multiple filters technique performs similar or better than existing approaches at a much lower complexity. Although these techniques have been developed considering the DVB-T/T2 pilot patterns, they can be applied to whatever system using pilot-patterned OFDM symbols. The last part of the thesis deals with the initial signal ynchronization for DVB-T2. In fact, the new standard for DTT provides a specific symbol, called P1 symbol, to ease initial signal acquisition and synchronization. We revise a synchronization technique based on the correlation of parts of the received signal showing that it fails to synchronize in practical channel conditions, e.g. single-frequency network (SFN) channels. Hence, we first propose a modified version of the existing technique to better exploit the correlation signal, then we analytically derive the maximum likelihood (ML) time and carrier frequency offset synchronization function. Unfortunately, the maximization of the likelihood function requires numerical methods, therefore we decided to simplify the scheme by considering a ML time (MLT) synchronization scheme, while resorting to a suboptimal estimator for carrier frequency offset (CFO). The proposed schemes are compared with existing solutions on both flat and frequency selective channels typically encountered in DVB-T2 transmissions, showing that both ML and MLT approaches are able to achieve synchronization with probability higher than 99%. The last chapter collects all the simulation results supporting the topics covered in the previous chapters.