Improving spectrum efficiency in television broadcasting using single frequency network

Abstract

The increased demand for mobile broadband has recently led to the increase in demand of more radio spectrum for mobile services. Although the spectrum demand is increasing, frequency spectrum as resource itself is not increasing which lead to its scarcity. World Radiocommunication Conference of 2007 (WRC-07) resolved that TV Broadcasting Services shall be digitalized by 2015, and release a big portion of the initially allocated spectrum to TV Broadcasting to be further used by other services and mainly mobile broadband services. Since then, much effort has been invested to improve and promote the use of different digital TV technologies such as DVB-T in Europe and part of Africa, ATSC in North America, ISDB-T in South America and DMB-T/H in Asian countries in order to meet the requirements and the deadline set by the International Telecommunication Union. With this trend, Rwanda migrated to Digital Broadcasting in July 2013 and all analogue broadcasting transmitters were switched off. However, the MFN technology adopted in Rwanda have not addressed the problem of scarcity due to the fact that in MFN each site should have a different frequency from neighboring sites while the number of available frequencies is low compared to the increase in number of TV program to be carried on the TV Network. This thesis study and propose a concept of single frequency network for TV Broadcasting in order to ensure an effective and efficient use of available spectrum. SFN used an OFDM scheme that allows all transmitters in a radio network to transmit identical signals in the same frequency block. The study shows as well the improvement achieved in spectrum efficiency using the Single Frequency Network, and provides part of the finding in a simulation format.