A software-based real-time DVB-C2 receiver

Abstract

DVB's second generation system for cable transmission -DVB-C2 -has been standardized in the beginning of 2009. This also set the starting point for the development of DVB-C2 equipment. Nevertheless, in the early stage a complete transmission chain for demonstrating DVB-C2 was not available. Therefore, we developed a DVB-C2 receiver employing a Software Defined Radio (SDR) approach. The system utilizes a standard PC and is able to decode an 8 MHz channel with 4096-QAM modulation in real-time. The developed receiver was used for the world's very first DVB-C2 transmission and will be extended to DVB-T2 in the near future.

Real-Time Generation of Standard-Compliant DVB-T Signals

“…The proposed code can be useful for many applications and can be easily modified. Future work could include DVB-T2 [37], DVB-T2-Lite [38], and DVB-C2 [39].…”

Complexity analysis of software defined DVB-T2 physical layer

“…The software implementation of DVB-C2 described in [15] simplified the demapper by not calculating LLR values at all, but instead performing a hard decision on the bit values sent to the LDPC decoder. Also, DVB-C2 [6] does not support rotated constellations, making distance calculations less complex.…”

“…Synchronization as well as channel estimation functionality was implemented in the software DVB-C2 receiver implementation described in [15]. Due to the typically very few and short echoes and overall high signal quality in cable transmissions, several simplifications could be made to these components of the receiver.…”

“…The DVB-C2 standard does however support up to 4096-QAM constellations. The LDPC decoder in [15] was implemented using a simple bit-flipping decoder. This allowed the authors of [15] to reach realtime performance on a general purpose CPU, though at the cost of significantly higher demands on signal quality.…”

“…A software defined DVB-C2 [6] (cable transmission) implementation, created within the GNU Radio framework, is discussed in [15]. As the DVB-C2 standard is quite similar in many ways to the DVB-T2 standard, we refer to the solutions presented in [15] in later sections. An SDR implementation of a DVB-T2 receiver is described in [16], where most of the system has been realized using FPGAs and DSPs (digital signal processors).…”