IEEE Spectrum December, 2012 - 57

At this point, the broadcast is nearly ready for transmission.
Finally, the digital bit stream is encoded in the RF waveform that
will carry the broadcast through the air. The ATSC's DTV system accomplishes the encoding through a modulation scheme
known as 8-level vestigial sideband, or 8-VSB. This method
maps the binary data onto the waveform by varying its amplitude among eight different levels.
It's worth noting that 8-VSB works very differently from
modulation methods employed by other dominant digital television standards, including China's Digital Terrestrial Multimedia Broadcast (DTMB) standard, Japan's Integrated Services
Digital Broadcast (ISDB) standard, and the Digital Video Broadcasting (DVB) standard, which was pioneered in Europe. These
standards use variations of a modulating technique called
orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM), which
divvies up the bit stream among several thousand carrier waves
at different, closely spaced frequencies, each supporting a low
data rate. The multiple small-bandwidth carriers are more resistant to signal deterioration-a characteristic that makes OFDM
well-suited to mobile television.
But 8-VSB, which uses a single wideband carrier, has the advantage of being able to carry more data. Remember, the ATSC
optimized this system to deliver high data rates to fixed receivers. Now, advanced standards such as MDTV and ATSC 2.0 will
add to that capacity many more desirable capabilities.

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DEcEmbEr 2012 * iEEE SpEctrum * NA

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Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of IEEE Spectrum December, 2012

IEEE Spectrum December, 2012 - Cover1
IEEE Spectrum December, 2012 - Cover2
IEEE Spectrum December, 2012 - 1
IEEE Spectrum December, 2012 - 2
IEEE Spectrum December, 2012 - 3
IEEE Spectrum December, 2012 - 4
IEEE Spectrum December, 2012 - 5
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IEEE Spectrum December, 2012 - Cover3
IEEE Spectrum December, 2012 - Cover4
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