Project Extra-Terrestrial Digital Broadcast Technologies (E.T. Broadcast)

The Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness of Spain funds the project “Extra-Terrestrial Digital Broadcast Technologies (E.T. Broadcast)” (TEC2014-56483-R) within the national basic research program call 2014, whose beneficiary is the Mobile Communications Group of the ITEAM Research Institute.

The overall scientific goal of the E.T.-broadcast project is to investigate and assess novel technical solutions for next-generation Digital Terrestrial Television (DTT) systems. The two main objectives of the project consist in assessing the performance for terrestrial broadcast of cutting-edge transmission techniques such as MIMO (Multiple-Input Multiple-Output antenna systems), multi-radio frequency aggregation techniques (time-frequency slicing and channel bonding), Layered-Division Multiplexing (LDM), and non-uniform constellations, in terms of increased capacity, coverage and spectral efficiency; and designing low-complexity signal processing algorithms for the receivers with a reduced impact in the system performance. All investigations will be initially performed in the context of the next-generation U.S. broadcast television standard currently under standardization, known as ATSC 3.0.

The E.T.-broadcast project is led by Dr. David Gómez-Barquero (Ramon & Cajal research fellow), which has a promising scientific track record in the development of new terrestrial broadcasting standards. Dr. Gómez-Barquero has been since 2008 actively participating in the European digital television standardization forum DVB (Digital Video Broadcasting, www.dvb.org). In October 2013 he joined the U.S. digital television standardization forum ATSC (Advanced Television System Committee, www.atsc.org) to work on the standardization process of ATSC 3.0, acting as Vice-Chairman of the Modulation and Coding ad-hoc group. The ITEAM Research Institute is full member of ATSC, DVB and the Future of Broadcast Television (FOBTV) initiative.

Links:
ATSC 3.0 Physical Layer elevated to Candidate Standard
Featured interview of David Gómez-Barquero in the ATSC Newsletter (September 2015)