A performance study of DVB-T2 and DVB-T2-Lite for mobile reception

The DVB-T2 system is an OFDM-based broadcasting standard used not only for stationary reception, but also for mobile applications. With respect to DVB-T, DVB-T2 improves the reception quality by using a more powerful channel coding, a sophisticated time interleaver, and several innovative algorithms, such as the multiple physical layer pipes transmission mode. In 2011, a simplified profile, known as DVB-T2-Lite, has been defined in order to reduce the implementation complexity and the energy consumption in mobile terminals. In this paper, we investigate the performance of DVB-T2 and DVB-T2-Lite for mobile receivers, assuming the TU6 mobile channel. Our investigation shows that the use of sub-slicing and inter-frame interleaving yields a performance improvement for both DVB-T2 and DVB-T2-Lite, at the expense of increased decoding latency. We also illustrate that the performance advantage of inter-frame interleaving is significant, especially at low mobile speeds. Besides, at very high speeds, DVB-T2-Lite with lower code rates is able to outperform DVB-T2.