IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON INSTRUMENTATION AND MEASUREMENT, VOL. 61, NO. 7, JULY 2012 1883 On the Use of Antenna Diversity Measurements for Mobile DVB-T Performance Assessment Leopoldo Angrisani, Member, IEEE, Roberto Cavaliere, Mario Farias, and Danilo Izzo Abstract—A novel measurement method based on antenna diver- sity principle is proposed for mobile digital video broadcasting— terrestrial (DVB-T) performance assessment. The method relies on an integrated measurement station and follows a measurement procedure that allows the direct comparison of A/V video signal quality and the respective electric field levels on a geo-referenced basis. The results of a wide measurement campaign performed in the urban area of Bolzano not only allow the validation of the method but also outline the necessity to enhance the practical application of the common link budget model, which predicts the minimum median field strength in a target area, as a function of the specific combining technique used at the receiver side. Index Terms—Diversity techniques, DVB-T, link budget model, measurement procedure, mobility conditions. I. I NTRODUCTION E UROPE and other countries of the world are in the peak of the switch-off process from analog to DVB-T digital television terrestrial standard. Most of these countries have chosen to adopt the 64-QAM modulation scheme, which guar- antees a high bit rate per multiplex and allows the hosting of a larger number of TV channels. The price for this choice is a reduced robustness in the communication, which limits significantly the availability of the TV contents in portable and mobile conditions, in particular, in urban environments where the multipath phenomenon is more relevant. Despite this, there is an emerging market of portable and mobile DVB-T receivers as a demonstration that DVB-T not only represents the European digital standard to substitute analog television but also can bring to a new fruition con- cept of the television medium, with several opportunities in different application scenarios, for example, in the intelligent transportation systems (ITS) domain. The reference standard for mobile and portable DVB-T/H radio access specifications is IEC 62002 [1], [2], which includes informative system aspects as well as specifications for minimum RF performance. In particular, receiving threshold conditions for mobile DVB-T are defined on the basis of the subjective failure point (SFP) Manuscript received July 28, 2011; revised November 13, 2011; accepted November 20, 2011. Date of publication February 10, 2012; date of current version June 8, 2012. The Associate Editor coordinating the review process for this paper was Dr. Mark Yeary. L. Angrisani is with the Dipartimento di Informatica e Sistemistica, Univer- sità degli Studi di Napoli Federico II, 80125 Napoli, Italy (e-mail: angrisan@ unina.it). R. Cavaliere, M. Farias, and D. Izzo are with the TIS innovation park, 39100 Bolzano, Italy (e-mail: roberto.cavaliere@tis.bz.it; mario.farias@tis.bz.it; d.izzo@lem-emc.it). 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/TIM.2011.2182262 criterion, which corresponds, on average, to “one visible error in the video, during an observation period of 20 s,” and are expressed as a function of the link budget evaluation model, in which the minimum equivalent field strength E med , expressed in dBμV/m, is directly linked to the carrier-to-noise ratio C/N , expressed in dB [3]. The application of the link budget model cannot be imme- diate since the choice of the value of its different parame- ters depends on usage scenarios and reference technology. In particular, many possible loss values can be applied for the quantification of the additional phenomena that apply to the signal; typical values are on the order of 3–5 dB, but without specific indications of which values to consider in relation to a particular reception mode. This lack of details is particularly significant for mobile commercial decoders based on single- reception scheme, which is the conventional one-antenna fix reception architecture replied in a mobile environment like a car. In fact, the application of the model may underestimate the values of the minimum field strength, producing an unexpected inability of mobile receivers in properly demodulating the DVB-T signals in a certain area. This criticality has a strong impact, in particular, in the practical reception of 64-QAM modulation, where reference thresholds present higher values: in this scenario typically, receivers have to operate in boundary conditions, where the success or the failure of the demodulating process can be a matter of some decibels. Mobile DVB-T receivers featuring diversity techniques are less sensitive to this problem because, in these conditions: 1) a gain factor estimated on the order of 8 dB for the C/N threshold, which verifies the SFP criterion in correspondence of low Doppler shift (10 Hz), can be reached, and 2) a remarkable increase of the maximum tolerated Doppler shift is obtained [4]–[6]. This paper presents an innovative measurement method based on antenna diversity principle, which improves the pro- posed solution described in [21] and gives the opportunity of: 1) assessing accuracy limits of the “other loss” parameter in the aforementioned link budget model, with special regard to mobile DVB-T, and 2) experimentally determining proper reference values of this parameter for urban areas. This paper is organized as follows. Section II provides some theoretical details both on mobile DVB-T reception and related link budget model, giving also an overview of major measure- ment techniques for digital broadcasting in a mobile scenario. Section III presents the measurement station and procedure that the proposed method consists of, and Section IV describes the experimental results obtained through the application of the method in an outdoor measurement campaign realized in the urban area of Bolzano, the main center of South Tyrol, 0018-9456/$31.00 © 2012 IEEE