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MEASUREMENT AND ANALYSES OF DIGITAL TV SIGNALS IN AN INDOOR ENVIRONEMENT

J T Ong, S V B Rao, Yan Hong, Shanmugam G

Nanyang Technological University, Singapore 639798

INTRODUCTION

An important aspect of terrestrial transmission is indoor portable reception. The Quality of Service parameters for both indoor and outdoor propagation must be characterized for planning of number of transmitters and repeaters required to provide minimum acceptable service. Digital television reception at fringe areas is characterized by very rapid transitions from near perfect reception to no reception when the signal falls by a few dB. In ~s scenario the development of prediction models are quite challenging and requires innovative and uniform approaches to fine tune the existing propagation models and to implement algorithms for analyzing measured TV signals. Significant work has been reported on the observed fading in indoor environment and it is widely accepted, that the signal received is the superposition of a slowly varying signal described by a lognormal probability density, and of a rapidly varying signal with a Rayleigh probability density. Estimation of local mean in Rayleigh fading environment has been studied by Reinaldo et a1 [I], Ravi Narasimhan et al [2]and Michel Lecours et a1 [3]. However little efforts are made to understand the slow fading in indoor environment. There are no guidelines on the selection ofproper length for averaging the local signal when measurements are made over a spatial interval of several wavelengths. If it is over hundreds of wavelengths (for outdoor measurements), the local maximum can be estimated using the technique given by Lee [4]. For indoor propagation the speed of the vehicle is of no concern and hence statistical modeling of signal strength as a function of position may be appropriate to generalize the results. Hence the important points to considered are the spatial interval over which the data is to be collected and the effect of spatial interval on the estimated slow fading component observed in an indoor environment. This paper presents initial DVB-T measurements conducted in the indoor environment. For this preliminary study, two unoccupied three-bedroom housing units (identical) at level three and five are used.

These are part of a 12-story block situated in the campus of the Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. Measurements are made along a line in the apartment with 5 cm spacing. Data is analyzed with different spatial intervals to study the spatial variation of the received signal on large scale. To obtain the slow. variations, the fast spatial variations were filtered out using a .running mean technique with window widths of 0.5, 1.0 and.l.5A. A comparison was made between the observed mean and standard deviations of the received signal with the above techniques. The results are presented in section three.

EXPERIMENTAL DETAILS
Transmission from the Bukit Batok Digital TV station, in Singapore at Channel 37 is used for the present measurements. The center frequency is 602 MHz (8 MHz bandwidth). The antenna is located 214 meters above ground level. The elevation of the receiver site is 80 meters above ml. The equipment used for the experiment was spectrum analyzer, TV receiver, omni -directional indoor antenna and laptop computer. The remote control software preinstalled in the laptop computer controls the TV Receiver via RS-232 port and records the measurement results. PC based software in Lab View program controls the spectrum analyzer. Measurements along a line (1-D) are conducted in the living area (on the 3" & 5& floor). A long piece of masking tape with 5cm markings was pasted on the floor from one end of the living room to the family room (1 135cm in length). The antenna was mounted on a tripod stand at a height of 127cm (average height of a TV set in a room) and moved point by point along the line. A total of 227 samples were collected using TV receiver and used to represent the statistics of the signal strength variation along the line. Measurements are also made along the same line using the spectrum analyzer. The layout of the apartment is shown in Figure.1. The description of each sector is given below. Sector A: Three walls in between transmitter & receiving antenna: The receiving antenna is very near to the wall of the living room. High penetration loss was expected. Sector B: One wall in between transmitter & receiving antenna: Owing to the presence of a window and fewer walls in between the transmitter and the receiving antenna, the signal strength in this sector is expected to be higher compared to sector A.

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Sector C Three walls i between transmitter & n receiving antenna: This sector is very narrow; the receiving antenna is very near to the wall in this sector. As a result significant drop in the signal strength is expected. Sector D: Two walls in between transmitter & receiving antenna: The signal strength is higher in this region due to the presence of window in the master bedroom.

RESULTS AND DISCUSSIONS:

Signal strength variations measured by the TV receiver along the line are shown in Figure.2. As expected the received signal suffered maximum losses in Sector A & C and moderate losses in sector B &D. The signal strength is observed to follow a certain mean spatial variation on the large scale. As expected there was fast spatial signal variation superimposed on the mean value: the average spacing between the minimums is found to be half a wavelength. The two fading patterns observed were different due to the fact that the 5 floor has some Los while the 3 floor does not have LOSto the transmitter.

To investigate the effect of spatial interval, 3 sets of data were selected by considering the samples at 5 , 10 and 15 cm interval which corresponds to 221, 144 and 1 4 samples respectively. The data is then subjected to one wavelength running mean to filter out the fast variations and the CDFs of the same were plotted on the probability paper along with the log-normal fit and the results are summarized in Table-I. It is interesting to note that there is no si nificant difference in the field strength observed between 3 floor and 5 floor. Usually 1.5dB gain is expected per floor. It was thought that this could he due to insufficient number of samples. Another set of data collected with a specttum analyzer is used and CDFs were plotted on probability paper. PC based software in Lab View program sweeps the 8 MHz DTV spectrum and record the field strength in every one second. With this data height gain of about 3 dB is seen between 3d & 5 floors. This indicates the lognormal behavior of the signal and the mean and standard deviations could be influenced by the sampling rate and the spatial interval.

To estimate the slow variations, the fast spatial

variations were filtered out from the data collected at 5 cm interval using a running mean technique with window widths of (0.5,l.O and 1.5h). Figures 3 & 4 compare the observed signal with different window widths with log-normal distribution for third and fifth floors respectively. It is observed that in general 0.5A is the best fit but bearing in mind that the minimum field strength (deep fades) are found at about half a wavelength, one wavelength running mean was selected to better represent the large signal variations.

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CONCLUSIONS:
In this paper preliminary results of the spatial variation of DTV signals received inside an apartment were presented. These are the first experimental results in Singapore and will be of interest for future. fixed DTV measurements. Measurements made along a line for about 20 wavelengths were analyzed taking different spatial intervals. RuMing mean technique with different window widths were studied to filter out the fast spatial variations. It is found t h t , a running mean of one wave length is suitable for averaging. Further it is observed that the number of samples and spatial intervals are very important in order to arrive at the percentage of coverage. Though the difference obsesed in the standard deviation is small, it matters very much at higher percentages of probability. An uniform approach must be adopted to allow for a meaningful comparison for measuring and processing the signals for DTV reception.

DTV measurements carried out under VALIDATE program in UK showed the variation of the received field strength with a standard deviation of 2.4 to 3.2 dB inside a room [5]. -Indoor DTV'studies carried in Munich, Germany using a digital city model reported a standard deviation of 12 dB in third floor [6]. NO details about the sampling and spatial interval used in these experiments were given. Hence it is important to identify the spatial interval over which the data is to be collected. Unless the measurement techniques were defined, it becomes difficult to compare the results. The adjacent sampling distance (0.81) suggested by Lee (4) may not be applicable to this situation because of the small dimension of the rooms. For TV reception the area of interest will be over few wavelengths and 0.8A spacing will give only 12 samples in a room of 5m X 5m at 600 MHz and may not represent the fast fading. Attempt has also been made to find out large-scale signal variation by identifying the points of maximum field strength reception. After identifying the maximum field strength points manually, it was found that the envelope of the spatial maximum could be used to estimate the slow variations of the received signal. A comparison of the observed difference in field strength between maximum field strength points with different running mean window widths are made. The results are not presented as the number of samples collected is very small. The relationship between the envelope of the spatial maximum and the large-scale running mean of the received signal is being explored by the authors.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS:

The authors wish to thank the IHPT students who made the
measurement and many colleagues for their contributions to this work. The authors would like to thank the Singapore Broadcasting Authority for supporting this project.

REFERENCES
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2.

3.

4.

5.
6.

Reinaldo A.Valenzuela et al, Estimating local mean signal strength of indoor multipath propagation. IEEE Trans. Veh. Techno]., vo1.46, No.], p.203-212, February 1997. Ravi Narasimhan., Donald C.Cax., Mean and variance of the local maxima of a Rayleigh fading envelope, IEEE communications letters, Vo1.4, no.11, p.352-352, Nov.2000. Michel Lecours, et a1 Statistical Modeling of the received signal envelope in a mobile radio channel, IEEETrans. Veh. Tehcnol., Vo1.37, no.4, p. 204-212, Nov.1998. Lee, W.C.Y.,Estimate of local average power of a mobile radio signal, IEEE Trans.Veh.Technol., vol.VT34, no.l,pp.2-27, Feb.1985 Weck,C., VALIDATE field trails of digital terrestrial television (DVB-T), Report of BBC VALIDATE project. Grosskopf,R., Indoor coverage of the DVB-T transmitters in Munich, 2000 IEEE-APS conference on Antennas and Propagation for wireless communications, 6-8 Nav.2000, p.57-60.

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Location

Spatial interval in cm

Signal power in dBpv at YO probability

Standard deviation In dB

50%

70%

90%

95%

I
'

15 20

163.83 164.06

1'60.63 161.07

I 56.02
156.75

I 53.81.
154.69

16.09 15.696

. .