Digital Audio Broadcast: Modulation, Transmission & Performance Analysis

Abstract

Radio broadcasting technology has evolved rapidly over the last few years due to ever increasing demands for as high quality sound services with ancillary data transmission in mobile environment. In order to accomplish this, Members of European Broadcasting Union (EBU), the European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI) and International Telecommunications Union (ITU-R) developed a completely new digital radio broadcasting technology called the Eureka- 147 Digital Audio Broadcasting (DAB) system which improves the overall broadcasting performance by delivering near CD quality audio and data services in mobile receivers along with efficient use of the available radio frequency spectrum.

Digital Audio Broadcasting (DAB) system developed within the Eureka 147 Project is a new digital radio technology for broadcasting radio stations that provides high-quality audio and data services to both fixed and mobile receivers. The system uses COFDM technology that combats the effect of multipath fading & ISI and makes it spectrally more efficient compared with existing AM/FM systems.

This project presents the performance analysis of Eureka-147 DAB system. DAB transmission mode-II is implemented first and then extended successfully to other modes. A frame-based processing is used in this study. Performance studies for AWGN, Rayleigh and Rician channels have been conducted. For all studies BER has been used as performance criteria.

This project also discusses issues related to system performance using concatenated coding technique, including the outer Block code, the inner convolutional code, outer BCH code and the inner convolutional code.