DVB-C transmitter With reference to the figure, a short description of the single processing blocks follows. •
Source coding and MPEG-2
multiplexing (MUX): video, audio, and data streams are multiplexed into an
MPEG program stream (MPEG-PS). One or more MPEG-PSs are joined together into an
MPEG transport stream (MPEG-TS). This is the basic digital stream which is being transmitted and received by home
set top boxes (STB) or relevant integrable decoder (e.g. Conax) module. Allowed
bit rates for the transported MPEG-2 depend on a number of modulation parameters: it can range from about 6 to about 64
Mbit/s (see the bottom figure for a complete listing). • MUX adaptation and energy dispersal: the MPEG-TS is identified as a sequence of
data packets, of fixed length (188 bytes). With a technique called
energy dispersal, the byte sequence is
decorrelated. • External encoder: a first level of protection is applied to the transmitted data, using a nonbinary
block code, a
Reed–Solomon RS (204, 188) code, allowing the correction of up to a maximum of 8 wrong bytes for each 188-byte packet. • External
interleaver: convolutional interleaving is used to rearrange the transmitted data sequence, such way it becomes more rugged to long sequences of errors. • Byte/m-tuple conversion: data bytes are encoded into bit
m-tuples (
m = 4, 5, 6, 7, or 8). • Differential coding: In order to get a rotation-invariant constellation, this unit shall apply a differential encoding of the two Most Significant Bits (MSBs) of each symbol. • QAM Mapper: the bit sequence is mapped into a base-band digital sequence of complex symbols. There are 5 allowed
modulation modes: 16-
QAM, 32-QAM, 64-QAM, 128-QAM, 256-QAM. • Base-band shaping: the QAM signal is filtered with a raised-cosine shaped filter, in order to remove mutual signal interference at the receiving side. • DAC and front-end: the digital signal is transformed into an analog signal, with a
digital-to-analog converter (DAC), and then modulated to
radio frequency by the RF
front-end.
DVB-C receiver The receiving STB adopts techniques which are dual to those ones used in the transmission. • Front-end and ADC: the analog RF signal is converted to base-band and transformed into a digital signal, using an
analog-to-digital converter (ADC). • QAM Demodulation • Equalization • Differential decoding • Outer interleaving • Outer decoding • MUX adaptation • MPEG-2 demultiplexing and source decoding • Programmable Transport Stream == DVB-C2 ==