The Technical Analysis on the China National Standard for Digital Terrestrial TV Broadcasting

Chao Zhang, Xiao-Lin Zhang, Cheng Lu , Zhan Zhang

School of Electronic Engineering, Beihang University, Beijing 100083, China

AbstractIn this paper, the China national standard for digital terrestrial TV Broadcasting is present. We mainly analysis the content such as the system structure of the standard, interface, modulation mode, interleave mode, channel coding, frame structure and frame header. At last, a summary on the technical superiority and characteristic of the standard is been carried out and commented. Index Itemsdigital TV, terrestrial broadcasting, multi-carrier, LDPC coding

I. INTRODUCTION
Digital TV broadcasting as a new generation of TV technique, the quality of its reception is improved significantly. To create more space for development of other services to the entire development of the electronic information industry is great significance. Digital terrestrial TV broadcasting is important component in the radio and television system. Digital terrestrial TV broadcasting with digital satellite TV broadcasting, digital cable TV broadcasting and other auxiliary systems together provides a full range of synergies audience coverage, and is an important part of our national coverage of radio and TV network. In natural disasters, wars and other circumstances, compared with the cable and satellite TV systems, terrestrial TV broadcasting has much more capability of resumption of the transmission. China is a major producer of color TV set, as well as the user of television, and has enormous potential in the digital TV market. So the selection of digital television standards, the own intellectual property rights has become a major consideration on the key issues. Now with many years hard working by several domestic universities and research institutes, based on a lot of laboratory testing, outfield test and continuously improved technique, China national standard, GB20600-2006 Framing Structure, Channel Coding and Modulation for Digital Television Terrestrial Broadcasting System was released by Standardization Administration of China in 30th August 2006 and it was approved in 18th August 2006. This standard is mandatory national standard and will carry out in 1st August 2007. The main technologies and independent innovations of this standard that can improve the performance of the system are: the design of the PN sequence frame header and symbol guard interval insertion that can achieve rapid and efficient channel estimation and equalization, Low Density Parity Check coding (LDPC), spread spectrum transmission of the system information, etc. This standard can support the baseband data payload from 4.813Mbit/s to 32.486Mbit/s, support standard-definition television (SDTV) and high-definition television (HDTV), support fixed point and mobile reception, support multi-frequency network (MFN) and single-frequency network (SFN).

II. THE STANDARD

This standard describes a baseline transmission system for digital terrestrial TV broadcasting. And it specifies the channel coding, modulation, interleaving and signal frame structure for SDTV/HDTV terrestrial service in UHF and VHF frequency band. As shown in Fig. 1, the following several processes

shall applied to the baseband MPEG-TS. First, the MPEG-TS is randomized by the scrambling, pass through the block of forward error correction coding, mapping and modulation, interleaving, system information insertion, and then the frame body is formed by the frame body adaptation. Frame body with corresponding PN sequence frame header forms the signal frame. Signal frame is converted to baseband signal by baseband data processing (8MHz). This baseband signal then up converted to the RF output signal.
Constellation Mapping & Interleaving
System Information Insertion System Information

TS Input

Scrambling

FEC

Frame Body Processing

Framing

Baseband Data Processing

Up Converter RF Output

Frame Header

Fig. 1. System structure of the standard A. Main Parameters According to the different applications and business needs, the national standard provides various working modes to choose. The main working modes and system parameters are shown in Table 1. Table 1. Main parameters of the standard Parameter Data Interface RF Interface Definition Support standard GB/T17975.1, support MPEG-2 According with standard SJ/T 10351 Outer Coding Inner Coding BCH762752 LDPC74883008 74884512 74886016

FEC Coding

Constellation Mapping Convolutional Interleaving Frame Header Length System Information Length Frame Body Length Signal Frame Length Signal Bandwidth Shaping Filter Baseband Data Payload

64QAM32QAM16QAM4QAM4QAM-NR Mode1: B=52M=240 / Mode2: B=52M=720 PN420PN595PN945 36 symbols4QAM mapping 3780 symbols500s 420043754725 symbols 7.56MHz Square root raised cosine filterroll-off factor =0.05 4.813Mbit/s~32.486Mbit/s

B. Interface The input data to the transmitter based on national standard is a baseband transmission stream. The standard can support standard GB/T 17975.1. Now the MPEG-2 format is widely used by the domestic TV station when program production, storage and transmission. Since the products in accordance with MPEG-2 format have developed into certain scale, the standard must support MPEG-2 standard. Meanwhile, the digital audio video coding technique, AVS standard, has been released recently, which was researched and developed independently, so the standard must take into account the common interface support and scalability. Therefore, the interface of the standard only adopts the data format of MPEG-2, which is ASI or SPI. The length of data package is 188 bytes, one byte synchronous head 47H, 187 bytes data. This system only requires the input bit stream to meet the frame format, while is transparent

transmission for the internal data. C. Scrambling To ensure a better transmission of random data, improve the quality of code synchronized, making the signal spectrum is more similar to the characteristics of the white noise, the base-band input data needs to be randomized by the scrambling code. The standard uses a 15 stages Pseudo-random noise sequence as the scrambling, whose generator is G(x)=1+x14+x15. D. Forward Error Correction Coding There are three international standards for digital terrestrial TV using the cascade code, such as in the ATSC system, the outer coding is RS code, inner coding is TCM code, and the DVB-T and ISDB-T use RS code as outer code and convolutional code as inner code, while the standard uses different error correction coding from the three international standards. The FEC of this system also includes two parts: outer coding and inner coding. In the system, Binary Coded Hexadecimal code is adopted as outer code and LDPC code as inner code. BCH code has been used and verified for many years, and achieved a mature experience. While Low Density Parity Check coding (LDPC) is an excellent linear error correction code at present, whose performance is closed to Shannon Limit. LDPC code is the hot topic of research in the field of the channel coding, and has been widespread concern currently. LDPC code is based on the sparse check matrix, and can be easily described and implemented by the hardware. The outer coding of the standard system is the BCH (762, 752), which is the shorter code of the BCH (1023, 1013). When implementing this code, there are 752 information bits and 10 parity bits in the BCH code. So the total bit of BCH codeword is 762. The generator of the BCH code is GBCH(X)=1+x3+x10. The BCH code serves two purposes. One is to adapt the data rate. When choosing various working mode, each frame of system must contains complete MPEG-2 packages, so the BCH code can match the length of the MPEG package and the LDPC code words. The other purpose of BCH code is to reduce the error-floor of the system. Since the BER of the length-limited LDPC code will not decreased when the SNR increase under high signal-to-noise ratio, which is called error-floor. The BCH code can reduce the error-floor of the system effectively. Experiments show that the error-floor of this standard is less then 10e-12, which means that our standard fully meets the requirements of HDTV broadcasting. In the system, the LDPC code is adopted as inner code. There are 3 LDPC code modes and the numbers of information bits are 3048, 4572 and 6096 respectively. The total bit of the LDPC codeword is the same for 3 coding modes, the number which is 7493. So there are 4, 6 and (or) 8 BCH code words are included in 1 LDPC codeword respectively. And then the first five parity bits of LDPC codeword will be deleted. So the total bit of LDPC codeword is 7488 finally. There are 3 FEC coding rates, namely 0.4, 0.6 and 0.8 respectively. 1) Code rate: 0.4 FEC (7488, 3008); 2) Code rate: 0.6 FEC (7488, 4512); 3) Code rate: 0.8 FEC (7488, 6016). E. Constellation Mapping In the standard, there are 5 mapping modes, namely 64QAM, 32QAM, 16QAM, 4QAM and 4QAM-NR. The mapping modes of 4QAM and 4QAM-NR correspond to the demand for high-speed mobile services, and can support SDTV broadcasting, as well as keep the balance between the coverage and quality of the receivers. The mapping modes of 32QAM and 64QAM correspond to the demand for high bit rate services, and

can support HDTV and multi-channel SDTV services. F. Symbol Interleaving The digital terrestrial TV broadcasting systems must have the ability of counteracting the burst pulse interference, so before transmission, we need to interleave the information signal, and then deinterleave after receiving the signal at the receive. We use the convolutional interleaving in the standard. And there are two convolutional interleaving modes, namely short interleaving mode and long interleaving mode. For short interleaving mode, B=52 and M=240, and the interval of interleaving and de-interleaving is about 100ms. For long interleaving mode, B=52 and M=720, and the interval of interleaving and de-interleaving is about 300ms, where B is symbol interleaving width and M is symbol interleaving depth. G. Frame Structure The digital terrestrial TV broadcasting system should support the basic mode of one-way, two-way transmission, as well as the non-symmetric expansion mode, should support the business requirements of the multimedia broadcasting and data services. In the standard, the frame structure is synchronous with the whole seconds, the natural time. There are four levels in the frame structure, as shown in Fig. 2.

Fig. 2. Frame structure of the standard The signal frame is the basic unit of the system frame structure. One signal frame is composed of two parts of time-domain signal, the frame header and the frame body. The baseband symbol rate of the frame header and frame body is same, which is 7.56Msps. There are 36 symbols of system information and 3744 symbols of data in one frame body. The system information (TPS) provides the necessary information of demodulation and decoding for each signal frame, including symbol constellation mapping mode, LDPC coding rate, interleaving mode, frame structure mode, etc. In each TPS, there are 36 symbols, whose modulation mode is BPSK. The frame header is composed of PN sequence. There are three signal frame structure mode and frame header mode in the standard. In frame header mode 1, the frame header includes 420 symbols and the interval of the header is 55.6us. In frame header mode 2, the frame header includes 595 symbols and the interval of the header is 78.7us. In frame header mode 3, the frame header includes 945 symbols and the interval of the header is 125us. So the maximum

distance between SFN stations are about 16km, 23km and 37 km respectively. For all signal structure modes, the frame body includes the same numbers of symbol. There are 3780 symbols in the frame body and the interval of frame body is 500us. So 3 interval of signal frame is 555.6us, 578.7us and 625us respectively. In different modes, there are 225, 216 and 200 signal frames in one super frame respectively, a group of super frame then form the upper frame structure which is synchronous to the entire second, thereby achieving the multilayer frame structure of the standard. H. Frame Body Processing The standards can two modes of support single-carrier and multi-carrier, these two carrier mode is achieved by the block of frame body processing. The data after the constellation mapping and symbol interleaving together with the system information is 3780 symbols, named X(k). X(k) frames the frame body after the frame body data processing. In single-carrier mode, the frame body is same to X(k), the data rate is 7.56Msps. While in multi-carrier mode, X(k) needs to been interleaved in the frequency domain, and then 3780 points IDFT. The purpose of the frequency interleaving is to map the symbol points to the 3780 effective carriers in the frame body, and is symbol interleaving within the frame body. The occupied bandwidth is 7.56MHz both for single carrier and multi-carriers. For the multi-carrier mode, there are 3780 carriers and the carrier spacing is 2kHz, so the bandwidth of multi-carrier is 7.56MHz. After framing, the frame data should pass through the square root raised cosine (SRRC) filter, and then we get the baseband data output. The roll-factor of the SRRC is 0.05. I. Baseband Data Payload Table 2 show the baseband data payload of the standard system in various working mode. Table 2. Baseband data payload Frame Header Constellation Mapping 4QAM-NR 4QAM PN420 16QAM 32QAM 64QAM 4QAM-NR 4QAM PN595 16QAM 32QAM 64QAM 4QAM-NR 4QAM PN945 16QAM 32QAM 64QAM 14.438 21.658 Note: The slashed modes in the table are not within the standards. 4.813 9.626 7.219 14.438 15.593 23.390 5.198 10.396 7.797 15.593 16.243 24.365 5.414 10.829 8.122 16.243 FEC coding rate 0.4 0.6 0.8 5.414 10.829 21.658 27.072 32.486 5.198 10.396 20.791 25.989 31.187 4.813 9.626 19.251 24.064 28.877

III. TECHNICAL FEATURES

Based on the full analysis of foreign existing digital television transmission standard and absorption of

new technologies in the field of information transmission in recent years, the nation standard adopts Chinese patents for inventions and technological innovations, realizes the better performance than the foreign existing standard, and the same time, fully considering the feasibility of achieving certification. At present, the launch equipment and receiving equipment has been developed that conform the national standard. The laboratory testes and the open testes of the State Administration of Radio, Film and Television, is proved that the overall performance of national standard is better than the international system to some terrestrial digital TV transmission standard. The national standards advantages of its technical characteristics are mainly in the following aspects. It provides the unified bandwidth, the unified transmission code rate, the unified time clock, the unified system information and unified frame structure. The use of the PN sequence as the frame head that implement the fast synchronization and efficient channel estimation and equalization. In order to achieve synchronization and channel estimation and equalization, according to the national standard, PN sequence is specially designed to fill the using a protective partition. PN sequences using realizes a rapid speed and effectiveness of synchronization and channel estimation. The PN sequence can also be used as a time domain equalizer training sequence to full play the role of decision feedback. The frequency domain pilot removed, the national standard improve the spectrum utilization, also make it easy for both single-carrier and multi-carrier modulation mode to be integrated. The use of advanced channel coding The national standard uses BCH outer code, LDPC inner code. LDPC coding is excellent linearity, its performance is superior to cascade code, BCH code used to help reduce error Layer. Thus, the national standards receiving threshold is lower than three ITU standards under the same conditions of the spectrum utilization, more conducive to fixed and mobile reception. Information System to Protect Against Fading Orthogonal Walsh sequence and sequence that used in spread spectrum transmission system are used to protect system information, which make system information is strong enough to against the time-varying multi-path channel. The way of information protected by the system is very robust. The use of system information, receiver can automatically identify the working mode and the mode of multi-carrier and single-carrier. Support the Use of Single Frequency Network Using the multilayer data structure can achieve physical layers and TS transmissions time synchronization. The principal and subordinate structure not depending on GPS can be used. The systems automatically adjust their delay relative to the main transmitter, to realize the entire single-frequency transmission network time synchronization.

IV. CONCLUSION
The national standard of the digital terrestrial television transmission, Framing structure, channel coding and modulation for digital television terrestrial broadcasting system, is the enactment that is the signs of the achievement of a platform for the promotion of independent innovation. Not only support SDTV, HDTV and other multimedia data broadcasting business, the standard can also meet the needs of the fixed and mobile receiving in large-scale coverage. As the achievement of independent innovation, it made a breakthrough in a single carrier integrated with multi-carrier modulation technique, realizing the key technological innovation and forming a number of patented technologies have independent intellectual property rights. Based on the good performance, higher spectrum efficiency, scalability strong, and our urban and rural areas to meet different application needs, the enactment will push the rapid and order development of China's radio and television industry to digital, promote the optimization and upgrading of

China's TV industry and sustainable development, and play an active role of better meet the needs of the broad masses of people.

REFERENCES
[1] Framing Structure, Channel Coding and Modulation for Digital Television Terrestrial Broadcasting System, GB20600-2006, Aug. 2006. [2] Digital Video Broadcasting (DVB); Framing Structure, Channel Coding and Modulation for Digital Terrestrial Television, ETSI, Tech. Rep. EN 300 744 v1.1.2, Aug. 1997.