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IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON BROADCASTING, VOL. 53, NO.

1, MARCH 2007

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A Design of Equalization Digital On-Channel


Repeater for Single Frequency Network
ATSC System
Yong-Tae Lee, Member, IEEE, Sung Ik Park, Ho Min Eum, Jae Hyun Seo, Heung Mook Kim,
Seung Won Kim, and Jong Soo Seo
AbstractThis paper presents a guideline for designing an
Equalization Digital On-Channel Repeater (EDOCR) and proposes an efficient method to implement it. The major concerns
in the design of an EDOCR are shortening the system delay,
maintaining synchronization between a main transmitter and
an EDOCR, obtaining high signal to noise ratio (SNR) output,
and enabling operation in an environment of adjacent channel
interference. The short system delay is achieved adopting a demodulation scheme without an additional lowpass filter to remove
harmonics, an intelligent slicer of a trellis decoder with a trace
back depth of 1 for equalization, and an equi-ripple filter for the
8-VSB pulse shaping filter. To maintain the synchronization, the
frequency offset information extracted from the received signal is
reflected on a re-transmitting signal. Distinguished features of the
EDOCR are adaptive equalization with the intelligent slicer which
corrects symbol errors caused by on-air interface including the
signal loopback, and the signal processing scheme which demodulates the received signal to a baseband symbol and re-modulates
the symbol. Hence, the EDOCR can produce an exact replica of
the main transmitters signal with high SNR although there may
be adjacent channels and input signal is distorted by multipath
and noise. Finally, the performance evaluation of the designed
EDOCR in both simulation and laboratory tests are presented
and implementations of single frequency networks employing
EDOCRs are discussed.
Index TermsATSC, digital TV, equalization, on-channel repeater, SFN.

I. INTRODUCTION
INGLE FREQUENCY networks (SFNs) are considered for
use in terrestrial Advanced Television Systems Committee
(ATSC) Digital Television (DTV) services because of the
performance improvement of DTV receivers which are able to
compensate for the long-time delay and high-level ghosts [1].
SFNs increase spectrum efficiency, and also provide high

Manuscript received August 2, 2006; revised September 30, 2006. This research was supported by ETRI (Telecommunications Research Institute) and
the MIC (Ministry of Information and Communication), Korea, under the ITRC
(Information Technology Research Center) support program supervised by the
IITA (Institute of Information Technology Assessment) (IITA-2006-(C10900603-0011)).
Y.-T. Lee is with the Electronics and Telecommunication Research Institute,
Daejeon 305350, Korea, and also with the Department of Electrical and
Electronic Engineering, Yonsei University, Seoul 120-749, Korea (e-mail:
ytlee@etri.re.kr).
S. I. Park, H. M. Eum, J. H. Seo, H. M. Kim, and S. W. Kim are
with the Electronics and Telecommunication Research Institute, Daejeon
305350, Korea (e-mail: psi76@etri.re.kr; hmeum@etri.re.kr; jhseo@etri.re.kr;
hmkim@etri.re.kr; swkimm@etri.re.kr).
J. S. Seo is with the Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering,
Yonsei University, Seoul 120-749, Korea (e-mail: jsseo@yonsei.ac.kr).
Color versions of one or more of the figures in this paper are available online
at http://ieeexplore.ieee.org.
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/TBC.2006.886453

Fig. 1. Structure of the EDOCR.

Signal to Noise Ratios (SNR) in the service areas [2]. SFNs may
also trigger the mobile DTV service [3].
Recently, the ATSC approved A/110A standard Synchronization Standard for Distributed Transmission for constructing
SFNs with multiple transmitters and a Recommended Practice
A/111 Design of Synchronized Multiple Transmitter Networks for examining all types of transmitters such as Digital
On-Channel Repeaters (DOCRs) and Distributed transmitters
used in SFNs [4], [5].
Among the transmitters, the equalization Digital On-Channel
Repeater (EDOCR) has been proposed to overcome the limitations of conventional DOCRs such as the susceptibility to antenna feedback, limited output power, possibility of inadequate
adjacent channel rejection, no co-channel interference rejection,
no multipath interference rejection, and no noise reduction [6],
[7]. Since an EDOCR internally cleans up and regenerates the
8-level baseband signal, it requires the less antenna isolation
and provides a higher output power, a better spectrum shaping,
and a better output SNR than the conventional DOCRs. The
performance of EDOCR was confirmed through laboratory and
field tests [8], [9]. Although it has shown such advantages over
the conventional DOCRs through the following several laboratory and field test, any detailed guidelines for the design of an
EDOCR system has not been published yet.

0018-9316/$25.00 2006 IEEE

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IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON BROADCASTING, VOL. 53, NO. 1, MARCH 2007

Fig. 2. Conventional VSB demodulation block.

This paper presents a detailed guideline to implement an


EDOCR system. A brief review of the main requirements for
the design of DOCRs is discussed in Section II. Based on the
requirements, a guideline and proposed unique structures for
designing an EDOCR system are explained in Section III. In
Section IV, the proposed designed EDOCR system is analyzed
through computer simulations and laboratory tests. Finally, the
examples of SFN implementation using EDOCRs are presented
in Section V.
II. REQUIREMENTS FOR DOCR DESIGN
DOCRs are similar to boosters used in analog TVs, in which
they re-transmit the received signal on the same frequency. Normally, DOCRs consist of a receiving antenna, a receiving signal
processing module, a transmitting signal processing module,
and a transmitting antenna. There are several ways to design
a DOCR, and they should satisfy the following requirements to
perform well in implementation perspectives [10][12].
First of all, a DOCR should maintain synchronization between
the received and transmitted signals. If the synchronization is not
accomplished, the main transmitters signal or DOCRs signal
would cause co-channel interference in the receiver.
Secondly, a DOCR should obtain a good isolation between the
transmitting and receiving antennas. If it is not satisfied, the coupling from the DOCR output back to its input leads to a feedback
around the amplifiers in the DOCR. Such a feedback can result
in an oscillation of the DOCR power amplifier. Therefore, it can
be said that the DOCR output power depends on the antenna isolation.
Thirdly, a transmitting signal through a DOCR transmitting
antenna should have a good quality although the received
signal is generally different from the desired signal due to the
distortions caused by the adjacent channels, multipath fading,
and noise. If such distorting factors are not removed properly,
it naturally follows that the transmitting signal still remains to

be distorted, resulting in a coverage reduction. The remaining


terms on the adjacent channels included in the transmitting
signal cause an interference to the adjacent channels. To avoid
such undesirable occurrences and to secure the high SNR
transmitting signal, the DOCR has to be able to effectively
recover the distorted received signal.
Finally, for proper operation of legacy receivers, a DOCR
should have a short time delay through the system. The DOCR
internal delay causes the signal from the main transmitter to
act as a pre-echo in the DOCR coverage area. Generally, the
receivers manufactured before year 2000 have an equalization
s to
s for the single 6 dB echo
window of about
and the receivers manufactured after 2000 but before 2004 have
s to
s.
an equalization window of about
However, the receivers in the recent market have shown
that the pre-echo performance has been significantly improved
time delay for 6 dB echo.
to work with more than
Moreover, the ATSC Recommended Practice on Receiver Performance Guidelines recommended that the equalization mask
s; 5 dB
for the future receivers should be 2 dB echo at
s; and 7.5 dB echo at
s [13]. This level of
echo at
pre-echo performance can easily accommodate the pre-echoes
caused by the DOCRs internal delay.
III. DESIGN OF EQUALIZATION DOCR (EDOCR)
The block diagram of the proposed EDOCR is shown in
Fig. 1. Basically, the structure of the proposed EDOCR is the
same as the baseband decoding type DOCR except that there
are no Forward Error Correction (FEC) decoder and encoder. In
addition, the EDOCR is capable of inserting its own Transmitter
Identification (TxID) signal. The EDOCR can be divided into
four sub-systems: receiving, signal processing, synchronizing,
and re-transmitting.
The major concerns in the design of an EDOCR are shortening the system delay, maintaining synchronization between a

LEE et al.: DESIGNING EDOCR FOR SINGLE FREQUENCY NETWORK ATSC SYSTEM

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Fig. 3. VSB demodulation block for the EDOCR.

main transmitter and an EDOCR, obtaining high SNR output,


shaping the output spectrum to meet RF emission requirements,
and enabling operation in an environment of the first adjacent
channel interference. The following sections provide the guidelines for designing an EDOCR that can satisfy the DOCR requirements.
A. Receiving Sub-System
The receiving sub-system includes the following elements:
pre-selector and Low-Noise Amplifier (LNA), down converter,
and demodulator.
1) Pre-Selector and Low-Noise Amplifier: The structures of
a pre-selector and an LNA in the EDOCR are the same as in
conventional RF and IF processing DOCRs. The Pre-selector
and the LNA are used to increase the selectivity and the input
RF signal level from the receiving antenna.
The pre-selector is a bandpass filter that eliminates the interfrequency
ference from image signals at
bands and other unwanted signals to avoid degradation of the
down-converted signal, where is the center frequency of desired RF signal and
is the frequency of fixed IF band which is
normally 44 MHz. A tunable pre-selector filter can be used for
easy changes of receiving channel, but a fixed pre-selector filter
is also applicable. The recommended signal level of the image
frequency band at the pre-selector output is at least 25 dB below
the desired signal power.
An LNA is used to boost the weak received signal to an appropriate power level for down-conversion without adding much
noise. The gain and noise figure of the LNA are important factors in determining the noise figure of the receiving subsystem.
An LNA with a low noise figure and moderate gain is recommended. In typical applications, an LNA has a gain of 10 dB

Fig. 4. VSB demodulation in frequency domain for the EDOCR. (a) IF down
converted signal, (b) baseband down converted signal, (c) baseband matched
filter, (d) matched filtered signal, (e) VSB demodulated signal (complex domain).

and a noise figure of 2.5 dB. The LNA should not introduce any
nonlinear distortion that can impact the EDOCR operation.
2) Down Converter: The down converter consists of a mixer,
a bandpass filter, an IF amplifier, and an AGC control block,
which are the same components as the ones in an IF conversion
DOCR. The down converter converts the desired RF signal to a
fixed IF band with sufficient signal level. The frequency of the
IF that involves a trade-off can be chosen by the designer. A

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IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON BROADCASTING, VOL. 53, NO. 1, MARCH 2007

Fig. 5. Symbol scatter plot of the matched-filtered signal obtained by a SRRC filter under the ideal channel. (a) The number of taps of matched filter: 481, (b) the
number of taps of matched filter: 121, (c) the number of taps of matched filter: 61, (d) the number of taps of matched filter: 31.

high IF leads to better image signal rejection, whereas a low IF


allows greater suppression of nearby interferers.
It is also possible to use a dual-IF down converter. In this
case, each local oscillator signal should be synthesized from a
common reference source. It should be pointed out that the same
common reference source should be used to synthesize the local
oscillator signal for up-conversion.
The down converter IF output signal power should be up to
10 dBm. To avoid long term signal variation, Automatic Gain
Control (AGC) should be implemented in the down converter.
3) Demodulator: Conventional demodulation method contains the process of matched filtering and lowpass filtering as
shown in Fig. 2. First, the digitized IF signal is down-converted
to near baseband signal; then, the near baseband signal is filtered by a near baseband matched filter; finally the matched filtered output is demodulated by down-converting to the baseband
and lowpass filtering. The problem of the scheme is that there
are two delay components; the matched filter and lowpass filter
[14].
To overcome the problem, a demodulation scheme is adapted
as shown in Fig. 3. This scheme achieves short time delay because there is no need for additional lowpass filtering to remove
harmonics. The baseband matched filter pairs are used for lowpass filtering as well as maximizing the received SNR. The digitized Vestigial Side Band (VSB) signal demodulation is done
in three steps as shown in Fig. 4. First, the IF signal center frequency is I/Q down-converted to 0 Hz; then, its I and Q components are filtered by a pair of baseband matched filters; finally,
the filtered I and Q components are up-shifted by 2.69 MHz and
combined to form the baseband signal.
In addition to the demodulation scheme, the number of taps
of the matched filter should be considered to reduce the system
delay. A square-root-raised-cosine (SRRC) filter is generally

TABLE I
MATCHED-FILTER TAP NUMBER AND DELAY VS. OUTPUT SNR

used for matched filtering. To completely remove the Inter


Symbol Interference (ISI) caused by pulse-shaping, the number
of taps of the SRRC filter should be infinite, but hundreds of
taps are enough for almost no-ISI condition. If a large number
of taps is used in SRRC filter, the time delay is increased as well
as the SNR. Therefore, the number of taps of the SRRC filter
should be determined by considering the trade-off between the
SNR performance and time delay.
To obtain the optimal number of taps, the delay and performance of the SRRC filter with different number of taps are analyzed. The associated simulation results are shown in Fig. 5.
In the simulation, the number of taps of the SRRC filter in the
transmitter was 521 and the symbols were over-sampled at 4
times the ATSC system symbol rate. To compare only the performance that depends on the number of taps of the matched
filter, the channel was assumed to be Additive White Gaussian
Noise (AWGN) that had no multipath fading. The SNR values
of respective tap numbers are shown in Table I. The delay time
from matched filter is calculated by
(1)
where D is the delay time from the matched filter,
is
is the overthe symbol frequency of ATSC system,
sampled ratio, and N is the number of matched filter.

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Fig. 6. Equalizer with an intelligent slicer for the EDOCR.

In the EDOCR system, since the equalizer with an intelligent


slicer (the detail will be described in the next section) is able
to enhance the SNR of the received signal and compensate for
the distortion caused by matched filtering with the SRRC filter
only with insufficient number of taps, it is desirable to focus on
reduction of the time delay. The recommended number of taps
is between 31 and 61 when the symbols are over-sampled by 4.
The recommended number of taps is based on the performance
analysis of the SRRC filter (Fig. 5). From Table I, the SNR becomes 18.6 dB when the number of taps is 31. However, this is
acceptable because the equalizer following demodulator compensates the distortion.
B. Signal Processing Sub-System
The signal processing sub-system includes the following
elements: equalizer with intelligent slicer and TxID insertion
system.
1) Equalizer With Intelligent Slicer: The equalizer in the
EDOCR is composed of a feedforward filter, a feedback filter,
and an intelligent slicer as shown in Fig. 6. The equalizer is used
to compensate for various forms of linear distortions in the received signal. The linear distortions are caused by multipath distortion, output signal loopback, adjacent channel interference,
and imperfect matched filtering. Moreover, the intelligent slicer
has the capability of error correction and results in improving
the SNR vs. BER performance.
To shorten the delay time from the equalizer in the EDOCR,
two parts of the equalizer are to be effectively constructed. The
first part is the reference tap allocation of the equalizer. Normally,
the delay time is determined by the position of the reference tap,
which allocates the anti-causal part and the causal part of the
feedforward filter. Therefore, the position of the reference tap
should be as leftmost as possible. However, since the movement of
the reference tap position affects the performance of the equalizer,
the position of the reference tap is determined by considering
the trade-off between the performance and the equalization time
delay. For example, the reference tap of the feedforward filter
is placed at the 6th position, thus, the delay time caused by the
feedforward filter is 5 ATSC symbol times and the number of taps
compensating for pre-ghosts becomes 5 taps.
The second part is the intelligent slicer scheme in the equalizer. A conventional slicer for estimating input symbols of the
feedback filter is a hard decision device in the decision feedback equalizer (DFE). The conventional slicer is simple for implementation and has no internal delay, but it may cause error
propagation and result in degrading the SNR performance of

Fig. 7. SER performance of the trellis-coded 8-VSB, uncoded 4-VSB and


trellis decoder with various TBD.

the equalizer output. To improve the performance, the trellis decoder (TD) may be a good candidate as a decision device [15].
When the TD is used for the decision device, the performance
gets better by increasing the trace back depth (TBD) of the TD
as shown in Fig. 7. However, increasing the TBD results in increasing the delay time which can be calculated by
(2)
where
is the TBD and 12 means the depth of trellis interleaver in ATSC system.
Fig. 7 shows that the Symbol Error Ratio (SER) performance
of the TD is better than that of the conventional slicer even
though the TBD length is 1. However, according to (2), 1 of
the TBD length does not cause any delay. Therefore, it is possible to increase the performance without increasing the delay
time by using the TD with the TBD of 1. The TD is called an
intelligent slicer, since the slicer is able to minimize the error
propagation in the DFE and correct the error data symbols of
the DFE output. The detailed performance analysis of the intelligent slicer is discussed in next section.
In order to minimize the error propagation, the DFE coefficients need to be updated. Several algorithms can be introduced
for updating the DFE coefficients. For example, the least-mean
square (LMS) and recursive-least square (RLS) algorithms were

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IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON BROADCASTING, VOL. 53, NO. 1, MARCH 2007

Fig. 8. Synchronization sub-system applied to the EDOCR.

applied in the training mode and the stop-and-go (SAG) and decision directed (DD) were used during the data segment. Based
on the performance analysis of the algorithms as shown in [16],
the LMS algorithm in the training mode and the SAG algorithm in the blind mode were chosen because, in the case of the
EDOCR, the convergence speed is not an important factor but
the stable convergence is required even at low SNRs.
2) TxID Insertion: Transmitter Identification (TxID) technique is used to detect, diagnose and classify the operating
status of radio transmitters. Due to an ever-increasing number
of transmitters, the need for transmitter identification is becoming an urgent issue since it enables the broadcast authorities
and operators to identify the source of in-band interference.
With the introduction of DTV broadcasting service over SFNs,
this is of particular interest now. The transmitters, which share
a single broadcast channel, naturally interfere with one another
in some coverage overlapped areas. Unwanted strong multipath
distortion may be generated by neighboring transmitters in
an SFN. This multipath effect may cause serious convergence
problems for the adaptive equalizer in a DTV receiver where
strong echoes, especially pre-echo, exist. These problems
can be effectively mitigated by monitoring and adjusting each
transmitters timing to minimize the unwanted multipath effects
[17].
Since the equalization process regenerates a clean baseband
signal, TxID signal, which behaves as low level noise on the
signal, is simultaneously eliminated. An EDOCR system has the
capability of either re-inserting the original TxID signal from
the received signal which comes from the main transmitter or
inserting a new TxID signal to identify itself. In the first case, the
EDOCR operates like an IF or RF processing DOCR where the
main transmitter TxID is simply passed through. In the second
case, the EDOCR operates similarly to a distributed transmitter.
C. Synchronization Sub-System
Because the EDOCR demodulates an IF signal to a baseband
symbol and re-modulates the symbol to the IF signal without

Fig. 9. Signal flow of the frequency synchronization. (a) Carrier frequency


offset by carrier recovery, (b) carrier frequency offset for compensation.

trellis encoding, it emits the same output symbols as the main


transmitters symbols. During this process, it is required to frequency-synchronize the transmitted signal with received signal
for avoiding Doppler effects that can be fatal to the performance
of legacy DTV receivers. There are two methods to achieve the
synchronization. One is to use an external frequency reference
signal such as Global Positioning System (GPS) [18], and the
other is to use the received signal from the main transmitter. In

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Fig. 10. Re-transmitting sub-system for the EDOCR.

Fig. 12. SRRC output SNR with varying the number of taps.

Fig. 11. Spectrum characteristic of SRRC with different number of taps.

the EDOCR design, the method using the frequency offset information with respect to the received signal is adopted for reducing the implementation cost.
Synchronization processing in an EDOCR is composed of the
recovery processing as a part of demodulation operation and
the compensation processing as a part of re-modulation operation. Fig. 8 shows the block diagram of the synchronization
sub-system applied to the EDOCR.
The recovery processing contains the carrier recovery and
symbol timing recovery and the algorithms for the carrier recovery and symbol timing recovery are the same as the ones
used in legacy 8-VSB receivers [19], [20]. When the carrier

recovery is performed at the demodulator, frequency offset information by measuring the frequency differences between the
pilot carrier and the Numerically Controlled Oscillator (NCO)
can be obtained. Also, the timing recovery enables to extract
symbol clock from the received signal.
By sharing the compensated timing clock from Voltage Controlled Oscillator (VCO) to Analog to Digital Converter (ADC)
and Digital to Analog Converter (DAC), the synchronized symbols between the received and the re-transmitted signal can be
obtained.
Also, by reflecting the frequency offset information which
comes from the carrier recovery to re-transmitted signal, the carrier frequency between the received and re-transmitted IF signals is the same and synchronized. As shown in Fig. 9, the offset
information from the carrier recovery is used directly for generating an offset compensated carrier at the re-modulator.

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IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON BROADCASTING, VOL. 53, NO. 1, MARCH 2007

Fig. 13. Symbol scatter plot of the demodulated VSB signal for the transmitted signal generated by the VSB filter. (a) SRRC filter with 521 taps (SNR = 42:3 )
dB, (b) ER filter with 141 taps without the pre-equalizer (SNR = 30:6 ) dB, (c) ER filter with 141 taps and the 101 tap pre-equalizer (reference tap: 20),
SNR = 41:5 dB, (d) ER filter with 141 taps and the 101 tap pre-equalizer (reference tap: 10), SNR = 33:7 dB.

The re-transmitted IF signal is up-converted to a re-transmitted RF signal by using the same local oscillator which is used
for down-converting the received RF signal to an IF signal. The
method of sharing the local oscillator is used for a conventional
IF processing DOCRs [21].
By using those methods, the EDOCR output signal can maintain frequency synchronization with the signal received from the
main transmitter. Although the phase of an EDOCR output may
not be equal to the phase of the received signal from the main
transmitter, this possibility will not cause much impact on the
signal reception. The phase noise of the pilot carrier output from
the EDOCR should be less than 104 dBc/Hz at 20 kHz offset
from the carrier frequency. This condition can be satisfied by
adjusting the loop filter bandwidth of the carrier and timing recovery block.
D. Re-Transmitting Sub-System
The re-transmitting sub-system includes the following elements: re-modulation & pre-equalization, up converter, High
Power Amplifier (HPA), and channel filter as shown in Fig. 10.
Because most of the delay time in an EDOCR comes from the

Fig. 14. Application of the EDOCR.

re-transmitting sub-system, especially the re-modulation & preequalization part, reduction of the time delay is very crucial in
design of the re-transmitting sub-system.
1) Re-Modulation & Pre-Equalization: In a conventional
8-VSB modulator, the VSB pulse shaping filter is made up of
an SRRC filter and the number of the filter taps is determined to

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Fig. 15. Analysis of synchronization between the main transmitter and the EDOCR. (a) Spectrum of Main transmitter and EDOCR, (b) input spectrum for receiver
(synchronization case), (c) input spectrum for receiver (non-synchronization case).

satisfy the transmission spectrum mask such as the FCC emission mask. Fig. 11 shows the spectrum characteristic of the
SRRC filter with different number of taps. In order to meet the
FCC emission mask requirement, the number of taps should be
greater than 481 because transmitter emissions must be attenuated by no less than 47 dB below the average transmitted power
in the first 500 kHz from the authorized channel edge [22].
The sufficient number of the VSB filter taps guarantees the
high output SNR of the transmitter as shown in Fig. 12. However, the delay time caused by the VSB filter depends upon the
number of its taps. If the up-sampling rate for the VSB filtering
is 4, the SRRC filter requires more than 500 taps which cause
about 6 us delay time. The delay time can be calculated by (1). In
an EDOCR re-modulator, however, since delay time is critical,
an SRRC filter with such a large number of taps is prohibited.
To shorten the delay time caused by the VSB filter, a VSB
filter with a small number of taps is needed while maintaining
the spectrum mask and output SNR requirement. One of the solutions is using an Equi-ripple (ER) filter. The filter coefficients
are obtained based on the Parks-McClellan algorithm [23]. The
high stop band attenuation with relatively short filter taps can
be obtained. It has been demonstrated that, for VSB modulation, the windowing VSB filter with about 140 taps is adequate
to meet the FCC emission mask requirements [24].
The cost for reducing the delay time by using the ER filter
is a moderate reduction of the SNR of the re-transmitted signal
because the ER filter is not an ideal Nyquist pulse shaping filter.
Figs. (13a) and (b) show the SNR performance versus the VSB
filter type. Simulation results show that the SRRC filter with 521

dB while the ER filter with 141


taps achieves the
taps provides the
dB. (Note: in the simulation,
to compare only the performance depending on the VSB filter
type, the re-transmission channel was assumed to be ideal, and
the number of taps of the matched filter in the legacy receiver
was set to be 121.) Although there is about 12 dB SNR drop, the
SNR decrease can be partially compensated with a pre-equalizer
which is generally used for compensation of in-band distortion
caused by the emission masking filter.
A pre-equalizer can also play a role of restoring non-ideal
pulse-shaping. As shown in Fig. 10, it is required to down-convert and demodulate the EDOCR final output for pre-equalization operation. The pre-equalization coefficients are updated by
comparing the EDOCR input symbol and feedback symbol from
the EDOCR final output. Figs. 13(c) and (d) show the pre-equalization performance when the ER filter is set to 141 taps with
, in which the
101 tap pre-equalizer to maintain
reference tap of the pre-equalizer is positioned at 10. The movement of the reference tap location from 10th to 20th at the same
while the delay time is
structure provides the
increased about s. The SNR values and delay time of respective tap numbers are shown in Table II. Since the SNRs of the filtered signals are greater than 27 dB which is the SNR satisfying
the ATSC system emission requirement [21], the pre-equalizer
with the reference-tap position of 10 is sufficient for re-transmission.
2) Up Converter: The IF VSB-modulated signal is up-converted to the RF band that has exactly the same frequency as
the input RF signal of the EDOCR. Because there are harmonic

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IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON BROADCASTING, VOL. 53, NO. 1, MARCH 2007

Fig. 16. The signal constellation performance of the proposed equalizer. (a) Proposed equalizer block diagram, (b) constellation of proposed equalizer input, (c)
constellation of original equalizer output, (d) constellation of intelligent slicer output.
TABLE II
THE SNR VALUE VS. POSITION OF THE REFERENCE TAP OF THE
PRE-EQUALIZER

IV. PERFORMANCE ANALYSIS OF DESIGNED EDOCR


The performance of the designed EDOCR was evaluated via
simulations and laboratory tests. Then, the performances in the
scope of satisfying the requirement of the DOCR design are
analyzed.
A. Synchronization Performance

components at the output of a DAC, they must be removed at the


IF stage. This can be done by using a lowpass filter or a bandpass filter. Meanwhile, because the up-converted signal contains
unwanted sideband spill-over, a bandpass filter is used for removing the unwanted signal.
3) High Power Amplifier (HPA) and Channel Filter: An HPA
is used for amplifying the up-converted RF signal. The gain of
the HPA depends on the operating power of the EDOCR and its
application; i.e., whether it is used as a gap filler or as a coverage
extender as shown in Fig. 14. In the gap filling application, an
EDOCR can be operated at under 10 W. However in the coverage-extending application, it can be operated at over 1 kW.
In case of coverage-extending application, it may be required to
add a pre-distorter block for compensating non-linear distortion
from the HPA.
A channel filter is used for removal of adjacent channel spillover in the transmitted signal. The channel filter used in an
EDOCR must provide proper filtering to meet the RF emission
mask specified by the spectrum authority.

Several areas of the EDOCR coverage are overlapped by signals from the main transmitter and the EDOCR as shown in
Fig. 15. In the overlapped area, the frequency synchronization
between the main transmitters signal and the EDOCRs signal
is critical for the reception performance of DTV receivers. If the
synchronization between them is not achieved, the main transmitters signal or the EDOCRs signal causes co-channel interference including Doppler shift in the legacy DTV receivers.
To analyze the synchronization performance of an EDOCR,
it was assumed that the signal from the main transmitter was fed
into an EDOCR and then it produced an exact replica of the main
transmitters signal in the same channel as shown in Fig. 15(a).
The signal from the EDOCR was assumed to be 10 dB greater
than the signal from the main transmitter in the overlapped area,
and the signals from both the EDOCR and the main transmitter
pass through only AWGN channel.
If the EDOCR signal is synchronized with the main transmitters signal, the situation can be represented as
(3)
where y(t) is the input signal of the consumer DTV receiver,
is the signal from the main transmitter,

LEE et al.: DESIGNING EDOCR FOR SINGLE FREQUENCY NETWORK ATSC SYSTEM

33

Fig. 17. Brazil A channel profile and SER performance of the proposed equalizer. (a) Brazil A channel profile, (b) proposed equalizer performance in Brazil A
channel condition.

Fig. 18. The EDOCR final output signal spectrum and the quality. (a) EDOCR final output spectrum with 100 W, (b) eye diagram of EDOCR final output.

is the EDOCRs signal which always


arrives later than the main transmitters signal at the receiver
due to EDOCR internal system delay, is relative delay time
of the EDOCRs signal to the main transmitters signal, and
is relative magnitude of the EDOCRs signal to the main
transmitters signal.
The above equation can be represented in frequency domain
as

(4)
where

and

is the envelope of the spectrum


. Its first two terms
represent the average signal power where 1 is the received
is the received
signal power from the main transmitter and
signal power from the EDOCR. The spectrum of the input signal
of the consumer DTV receiver has in-band ripple whose peak to
and duration is
as shown in Fig. 15(b).
peak value is
The signal from the main transmitter acts as a pre-ghost to the
EDOCRs signal and can be removed by an equalizer in the
consumer DTV receiver.
However, if there is no synchronization BETWEEN the
main transmitter and the EDOCR, there is no in-band ripple
as shown in Fig. 15(c). In this case, the
in the spectrum
main transmitters signal causes co-channel interference to

34

IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON BROADCASTING, VOL. 53, NO. 1, MARCH 2007

Fig. 19. Antenna isolation performance of the EDOCR. (a) Received signal profile with feedback coupling, (b) MSE convergence of the proposed equalizer, (c)
SER performance of equalizer output with feedback coupling.

the EDOCRs signal and the consumer DTV receiver do not


decode the signal.
B. High Output SNR Performance
The high output SNR of the EDOCR is guaranteed by the proposed equalizer which has the capability of multipath rejection
and noise reduction in the received signal. To analyze the capability, a Brazil A channel model that represents an outdoor
rooftop antenna or an attic-mounted indoor antenna channel
[25] was used. Because most repeaters are located on the top of
mountains and high-rise buildings, a dominant signal path from
the main transmitter can be achieved in typical repeater sites
with relatively high SNR [18]. The EDOCR input signal passing
through the Brazil A channel model from the main transmitter
was assumed to be 25 dB SNR. Fig. 17(a) shows the profile of
the Brazil A channel model.
Fig. 16 shows that the EDOCR can remove the multipath and
noise components from air interface. Fig. 16(a) is the simulation
block diagram of the proposed equalizer used in the EDOCR.
The basic configuration and operation of the proposed equalizer
are the same as the conventional DFE except that an intelligent
slicer is used for symbol decision. Fig. 16(b) is the constellation
of the proposed equalizer input signal. Because of the multipath
effects, the eye is closed. After the DFE processing, the original
equalizer output constellation is shown in Fig. 16(c). The noise
components are still remained while the multipath effects are
removed. The noise components are rejected through the intelligent slicer as shown in Fig. 16(d). Therefore, it becomes pos-

sible to regenerate 8-VSB signals without distortion from air


interface.
Fig. 17(b) shows the SER performance at the proposed equalizer. The EDOCR with inclusion of the intelligent slicer can improve the SER performance. Moreover, it can re-generate error
free symbols by extracting symbols at the intelligent slicer.
The equalized symbol feeds into the re-transmission
sub-system which contains the 141 tap ER filter and the
pre-equalizer with the reference tap position of 10. The output
signal of the sub-system shown in Fig. 18 presents that the
EDOCR output spectrum satisfies the FCC spectrum mask and
the output SNR is greater than 33 dB.
C. Antenna Isolation Performance
To verify that the EDOCR has high antenna isolation, a modified Brazil A channel model was used, which represents the
air interface and feedback component from the EDOCR transmitting antenna to the receiving antenna. Fig. 19(a) shows the
channel profiles. There is a feedback signal varied from 8 dB
to 4 dB with the EDOCR system delay of s. When the signal
is received to the EDOCR, the Mean Square Error (MSE) convergence performances of the proposed equalizer in the EDOCR
are shown in Fig. 19(b). Fig. 19(c) shows the SER performance
of the EDOCR output. One can observe that the EDOCR corrects errors at the equalizer output by using the intelligent slicer.
The simulation results show that, if the feedback signal is less
than 4 dB, the EDOCR can remove the effects from the feedback coupling. Thus, the EDOCR can be implemented with high

LEE et al.: DESIGNING EDOCR FOR SINGLE FREQUENCY NETWORK ATSC SYSTEM

35

Fig. 20. Adjacent channel rejection performance of the EDOCR. (a) Main transmitters block (desired Transmitter is #2), (b) air interfacing modeling, (c) EDOCR
block diagram, (d) main transmitters signal spectrum, (e) EDOCR input signal spectrum, (f) EDOCR output signal spectrum.

TABLE III
TOTAL SYSTEM DELAY OF THE DESIGNED EDOCR

E. System Delay Performance


The EDOCR system delay is composed of delays from analog
components such as harmonic rejection filters and channel mask
filter, digital components such as DAC, ADC, matched filter,
and 8-VSB pulse shaping filter, and hardware implementation
such as clock mismatch. The total time delay of the designed
EDOCR except the delay of the hardware implementation is
summarized in Table III. The measured EDOCR system delay is
s as shown in [8]. The estimated time delay of the hardware
implementation is about
s.
V. SFN IMPLEMENTATION USING EDOCR

antenna isolation and therefore results in having a high output


power.
D. Adjacent Channel Rejection Performance
To verify that the EDOCR has good adjacent channel rejection performance and good output signal quality, simulations
have been performed and the performance of the output signal
spectrums are shown in Fig. 20. For the simulation, the Brazil
A channel model whose profile is shown in Fig. 20(b) was used
and the EDOCR input SNR was assumed to be 25 dB with inclusion of adjacent channel. Even though there are adjacent channels as shown in Fig. 20(d) and the input signal is distorted by
multipath and noise as shown in Fig. 20(e), Fig. 20(f) shows that
the output spectrum of the EDOCR has good quality, as a replica
of the main transmitter signal.

There are two fundamental ways to implement SNFs, that is,


by means of the use of Distributed transmitters (DTxTs) and by
means of the Digital On-Channel Repeaters (DOCRs). They can
be used separately, or jointly [5], [9]. We focus on the way using
DOCRs, especially using EDOCRs as illustrated in Fig. 21.
Fig. 21(a) shows an example of employing the EDOCRs can
be used with deployed to implement a regional SFN. In this
example, the repeaters that were installed to fill up the main
transmitters gap or to extend the main transmitters coverage
are replaced with the EDOCRs. Since there is no change in the
deployed main transmitters, just a replacement of the repeaters
will be the first step for designing an SFN.
After the replacement of the repeaters, the broadcasting networks need to be changed to employ a single high power transmitter instead of three transmitters. Fig. 21(b) shows an example
to employ the EDOCRs in a complete SFN with a main high
power transmitter.
Moreover, EDOCRs can be used with distributed transmitters based on the ATSC standard A/110A. Fig. 21(c) shows an

36

IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON BROADCASTING, VOL. 53, NO. 1, MARCH 2007

Fig. 21. Examples of SFN implementations using the EDOCRs. (a) Regional SFN using EDOCRs, (b) complete SFN using EDOCRs, (c) complete SFN using
hybrid of distributed transmitters and EDOCRs.

example of a complete SFN using the hybrid of the distributed


transmitters and EDOCRs. In this case, however, the deployed
transmitters should be changed with the transmitters which satisfy the A/110A standard.
VI. CONCLUSION
We provided a guideline for designing an EDOCR system
which has a unique structure, such as the demodulation scheme
without an additional harmonics rejection lowpass filter, the intelligent slicer of a trellis decoder with a trace back depth of 1 for
equalization, the synchronization scheme using frequency offset
information extracted from the received signal on re-transmitting, the equi-ripple filter for 8-VSB pulse shaping, and the
combination of pre-equalization for restoring non-ideal pulseshaping. In accordance with the performance evaluation of the
designed EDOCR by computer simulations and laboratory tests,
the EDOCR successfully meets the DOCR requirements as it
re-generates the replica of the main transmitter with maintaining
synchronization and relatively short time (less than s) system
processing delay in presence of adjacent channel interference,
signal loopback, and multipath distortion occurring in the path
from the main transmitter to the EDOCR.
The analysis on the trade-offs of various parameters required
for implementing the EDOCR system enables one to easily optimize the EDOCR implementation in each situation. The example of EDOCR application provides methods of SFN implementations with deployed transmitters or distributed transmitters. It is, therefore, expected that the design technology of
the EDOCR system may contribute to save frequency resources
in countries with a single carrier based broadcasting system
such as the Advanced Digital Television Broadcasting Terrestrial (ADTB-T).

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37

Jae Hyun Seo received the BSEE and MSEE from


Kyungpook National University, Daegu, Korea, in
1999 and 2001 respectively. Since January 2001, he
has been with the Broadcasting System Department,
Electronics and Telecommunications Research Institute (ETRI), Daejeon, Korea, developing advanced
transmission and reception technology for terrestrial
digital television. His research interests are digital
signal processing, spatiotemporal signal processing,
in particular, signal processing for digital television
and digital communications.

Heung Mook Kim received the BSEE and MSEE


in electronics and electrical engineering from
POSTECH, Pohang, Korea, in 1993 and 1995
respectively. From February 1995 to January 2002,
he was with POSCO Technology Laboratory in the
field of Measurement and Monitoring as research
engineer. Since February 2004, he has been with the
Broadcasting System Research Department at ETRI,
developing advanced transmission and reception
technology for terrestrial digital television as a senior member of research staff. His research interests
are digital signal processing and RF transmission for digital communication
systems.

Yong-Tae Lee received the BSEE and MSEE from


Hankuk Aviation University in 1993 and 1995. Since
1995, he has been with the Radio Signal Processing
Department and Broadcasting System Research Department, Electronics and Telecommunications Research Institute (ETRI), where he is a senior member
of research staff. Also, he is currently at Yonsei University pursuing Ph.D. degree. His research interests
are in the area of digital signal processing and RF
signal processing, in particular, signal processing for
digital broadcasting systems and digital communica-

Seung Won Kim received the BSEE and MSEE


from Sung Kyun Kwan University, Korea, in February 1986 and 1988 respectively. Since June 1989
he has been employed at ETRI(Electronics and
Tele communications Research Institute), Korea.
He received his Ph.D. from University of Florida,
USA, in May 1999. He is currently a leader of DTV
system research team at the ETRI. His main research
interests are in the areas of digital communication
systems, digital signal processing and DTV transmission systems. He is a member of IEEE and a
member of the IEEE Broadcast Technology Society Administrative Committee.

Sung-IK Park received the BSEE from Hanyang


University, Seoul, Korea, in 2000 and MSEE from
POSTECH, Pohang, Korea, in 2002. Since 2002, he
has been with the Broadcasting System Department,
Electronics and Telecommunications Research
Institute (ETRI), where he is a member of Research
Staff. His research interests are in the area of error
correction codes and digital communications, in
particular, signal processing for digital television.

Jong Soo Seo received the BS degree in electrical


engineering from Yonsei University, Seoul, Korea,
in 1975 and the MS and Ph.D. degrees from the
University of Ottawa, Canada in 1983 and 1988,
respectively. He worked in IDC and CAL, Canada,
for digital satellite and broadcasting systems for six
years. Since 1995, he has been with the Department
of Electrical and Electronics Engineering at Yonsei
University, Seoul, Korea, where he is a professor. He
has three international patents in digital transmission
areas and has published about 20 IEEE papers. Since
Nov. of 2001, he has been a director of the Center for Advanced Broadcasting
Technology, Yonsei University. His current research interests include 4G digital
communications and digital broadcasting technologies.

tion systems.

Ho Min Eum received the BSEE and MSEE from


Korea University, Korea, in February 1998 and 2000
respectively. Since May 2000 he has been employed
at ETRI (Electronics and Telecommunications Research Institute), Korea. He is currently a senior engineering staff of DTV system research team at the
ETRI. His main research interests are in the areas
of digital communication systems, digital signal processing and DTV transmission systems.

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