mypdf

Aristote and Amen

December 2023

30 A.-C. Honfoga et at.

Figure 1: Fig.2 UFMC Block Diagram

UFMC employs two N F F T points in the receiver allowing the data symbol recovery without
the need for CP. However, the 2N F F T points cause a noise increase problem in UFMC reception,
degrading the UFMC performance compared to OFDM when only AWGN is used as the channel.
While the contribution of Gaussian noise on the CP is canceled in OFDM at the receiver, in UFMC,
this contribution is maintained in the filter length used in UFMC. As the 2N F F T points used in
demodulation include the filter length contribution, this effect is highlighted on UFMC performance
when Gaussian noise is used. Otherwise, UFMC performance is better than that of OFDM in
the presence of frequency-selective channels. Furthermore, both OFDM and UFMC use a one-tap
Zero Forcing equalizer. A deep comparison between OFDM and UFMC in terms of transmitter,
receiver, and their PSD is presented in ref10. UFMC could substitute CP-OFDM with high spectral
efficiency (125% improvement) due to CP cancellation and its small guard band (281a instead of
5503 in OFDM).

5 DVB-T2 Physical Layer

In this section, the DVB-T2 system is briefly presented, as well as the model and simulation param-
eters.

5.1 Lite Version Including NUCs and UFMC

DVB-T2 is the second-generation terrestrial broadcasting system published by the European Telecom-
munications Standards Institute (ETSI) in 2005. It offers a choice of flexibility to broadcasters. Com-
pared to DVB-T, it introduces many innovative features allowing to reach a throughput of 50.32
Mbit/s ref22. The main two parts of this system are the BICM block and the multicarrier modula-
tion block. In the specific way, the first block includes a FEC code Bose-Chaudhuri-Hocquenghem

1
(BCH) and Low-Density Parity Check (LDPC), bit interleaving, and a QAM mapping. The second
block includes Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM)-CP. Indeed, the adoption of
powerful FEC schemes in substitution for a combination of a convolutional code with an outer Reed
Solomon code results in a larger FEC gain obtained at the price of increased complexity induced
by these coders. As known, LDPC is based on a high-density parity-check matrix with short or
long FEC frames, and the decoding step is processed using a Belief Propagation (BP) algorithm.
Despite the gain provided by the FEC scheme, QAM constellations’ optimization has been studied
in the literature. As known, 1D-NUCs with 64 and 256 constellation points have been proposed
for DVB-NGH ref3, and both 1D and 2D-NUCs have been proposed in ATSC 3.0 to increase the
BICM capacity. Due to the performance gain obtained with 2D-NUCs ref4,ref11 and UFMC ref10,
we propose in this paper to substitute QAM constellations by 2D-NUCs constellations (like in ATSC
3.0) in DVB-T2, also replacing the OFDM waveform by UFMC. Furthermore, a long FEC frame is
used at the LDPC encoder. Figure fig:system presents the implemented system based on simulation.

Figure 2: Fig. 3. DVB-T2 model implemented

Due to the fact that LDPC and QAM mapper are in the BICM main blocks which take out the
BICM performance, we focus our simulation only on these blocks. As the interleaving block is useful
in the presence of impulsive noise, this block is not used in the simulation.

5.2 Channel Used and Parameters

In this subsection, the DVB-T2 system parameters are presented in Table 1.
32 A.-C. Honfoga et al.

Table 1. DVB-T2 systems parameters

NFFT 1K, 2K, 4K, ((8h, 16, 32)K and ext)

Modulation 4,16, 64, 256-QAM
FEC frame long (64fiO0 bits), hort (16200 bits)
CR LDPC 1/2, 3/5, 2/3 ,3/4, 4/.3, 5/5
Bandwidth 1.7, 5, 6, 7,8, 10 MHz
CP 1/128, 1/32, 1/16, 19/256, 1/8, 19/128, 1/4

Figure 3: Un tableau simple

Table 2. TU6 channel [22]

Parameters in red represent those used in the simulation. NFFT is the number of subcarriers used
with OFDM. The term ”ezt” means extended. As the 4-QAM constellation has not been optimized
for NUCs, other constellation sizes are used for NUCs simulation. Due to the fact that simulation
results, as shown in [reference], indicate that 2D-NUCs outperform QAM in the DVB-T2 system,

2
 PDP description Path 1 Path 2 Path 3 Path 4 Path 5 Path 6
Delays(ns) 0 200 500 1600 2300 5000
Power(dB) -3 0 -2 -6 -8 -10

Figure 4: Table Caption

and the gain is highlighted for lower code rates such as 1/2, 3/5, and 2/3, our simulation will focus
on them.
UFMC parameters used for simulations are: fi = 32768128 = 256, fi = 125, fip = 234, and fiff = 60
dB. The maximum gains of NUCs are attained for code rates with high FEC. This implies that the
number of redundancy bits is high, justifying the choice of these code rates.
The FFT mode 32K has been chosen, as this mode is mainly used by broadcasters for rooftop
antenna reception [reference]. The constellation size of 256 is used for the TUfi channel due to the
density of constellation points, which usually performs poorly in worse reception conditions.
Additionally, the choice of parameters suitable for UFMC depends on the cyclic prefix (CP) of
the system and the density of the hub-bands. CP=1/128 (low CP of DVB-T2 standard) has been
chosen to fulfill the UFMC requirements in terms of filter length used. It is proven that UFMC
performance is better when the number of hub-bands increases [reference] and the number of bits
per symbol increases [reference].
The channel bandwidth of 6 MHz has been chosen as it is the bandwidth used for network
deployment by broadcasters in many European and African countries. To evaluate performance in
the DVB-T2 environment, the TU6 channel, which models urban environments, is used. The Power
Delay Profile (PDP) of this channel is presented in Table 2. The method used to implement the
TU6 channel is based on Tappe’s Delay Line (TDL) model described in [reference]. The root mean
square (RMS) delay spread of TU6 is about 1.0616 × 10−6 s.
Filtered Based UFMC Waveform Applied on Joint DVB-T2/NUC System.

5.3 Non-Uniform Constellations Shapes

In this subsection, NUCs biased in simulation are presented for each code rate. Figure 4, Fig. ñ,
and Fig. G present 2D-64-NUCs and 2D-256-NUCs, respectively, for code rates 1/2, 3/5, and 2/3.

Figure 5: Fig. 4. 2D-64-NUC and 2D-256-NUC constellations for CR 1/2, 3/5, 2/3

As noticeable, these constellations are optimized for each code rate. In comparison with QAM
constellations, which are designed to work with any code rate, these constellations are designed and
optimized for a specific SNR value. This value depends on the FEC frame length, the code rate,

3
and the channel distribution. Note that these constellations are already proposed for the DVB-T2
system [reference].

6 Simulation Results
In order to evaluate the combination of NUCs and UFMC performance in the DVB-T2 system, our
simulator has been validated (fl.A) using AWGN and the parameters previously presented. The
simulation tool is MATLAB version 2016. Simulations have been performed using the Monte-Carlo
method. The reception process takes place for each iteration of SNR, and the BER is computed.
34 A.-C. Honfoga et at.

Figure 6: Fig. 5 2D-64-NUC and 2D-256-NUC constellations for CR 3/5

Between the bits randomly generated and the bits after the LDPC decoder, the system has been
simulated (6.B) in the presence of a frequency-selective TU5 channel using high-order constellations.
The gain in NUCs and UFMC is maximum with these constellations. Using this channel, 100 different
channel realizations have been generated, and the performance results presented in this paper are
the mean of the computed BER for each realization.

6.1 System and Performance Validation

Using AWGN, in order to validate the simulator, OFDM/QAM and OFDM/NUCs simulation results
are presented. Results have been compared to simulation results about DVB-T2/OFDM given at
10−4 in the implementation guideline of DVB-T2 [?]. Figure ?? presents the simulation results
for constellation sizes 15, 64, and 256 and code rates 1/2, 3/5, and 6. At a BER of 10−4 , the
simulation results for DVB-T2/OFDM/QAM and those presented in [?] are comparable. However,
when compared to DVB-T2/OFDM/2D-NUCs, there is a noticeable gain for the combination of
constellations and code rates. The more the constellation size increases, the more the 2D-NUCs
gain increases. This confirms the good behavior of our simulator and the trends in the literature.
Furthermore, UFMC/QAM and UFMC/NUCs simulation results are presented in Fig. ?? to confirm
the fact that NUCs can be used with the UFMC waveform.