Digital Video Broadcasting-Terrestrial (DVB-T) is the most widely deployed digital terrestrial
television system worldwide with services on air in over thirty countries. In order to increase
its spectral efficiency and to enable new services the DVB consortium has developed a new
standard named DVB-T2. A nearly definitive specification has already been published as a
BlueBook as well as an implementation guideline, where the structure and main technical
novelties of the standard have been defined. The imminent publication of the final DVB-T2
standard will give rise to the deployment of new networks and commercial products.
The differences between the original DVB-T and the new DVB-T2 standards are many and
important. The latest coding, interleaving and modulation techniques have been included in
this large and flexible specification to provide capacity and robustness in the terrestrial
transmission environment to fixed, portable and mobile terminals. Multiple-input multipleoutput
(MIMO) techniques, low-density parity-check codes (LDPC), rotated constellations,
new pilot patterns or large interleaving schemes are the most remarkable signal processing
algorithms that have been included to overcome the limitations of the much simpler DVB-T
broadcasting standard.
This chapter focuses on the mentioned new algorithms and the opportunities that arise from
a signal processing perspective. New transmission and reception techniques are proposed
which can be used to enhance the performance of DVB-T2, such as iterative demapping and
decoding, new antenna diversity schemes or more efficient channel estimation algorithms.
Furthermore, the performance of the new standard is analyzed and evaluated through
simulations focusing on the aforementioned algorithms. The behaviour of the standard is
specially studied in single-frequency networks (SFN), where the vulnerability of the former
standard is prohibitive when destructive interferences arise.