For many decades, we have been watching analogue television. But now we are living in the age of digital TV. Digital transmission allows more information to be sent than analogue in a channel with the same amount of bandwidth. Digital television also does'nt suffer from the same problems as analogue TV, such as “ghosting” and snow. And television in the digital age won’t be limited to video and audio, it will become truly interactive. Combined with High Definition TV and digital sound, this means better pictures and sound.

The DVB-T standard (a European standard, also adopted by Australia) covers source coding of video and audio signals, channel coding, and the transport of signals over terrestrial links. The aim of this project is to understand and build a complete simulation of the channel coding and transmission aspects of the DVB-T standard and test their effectiveness. The simulation will be written in MATLAB. Input data comes from MPEG audio and video bit streams, which are coded using Reed-Solomon and convolution codes. The coded stream is then sent through the channel using Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM), which is known to have high resistance to multipath fading channels. We aim to model a realistic channel which is corrupted by noise and other kinds of interference. The receiver does the inverse operation as in the transmitter to recover the original MPEG bit streams.

Peter Wang, Jia Su, Dr Chandra Athaudage