PERFORMANCE EVALUATION OF DVB-T2 BROADCASTING NETWORK: A CASE STUDY OF DAR ES SALAAM, TANZANIA

DVB-T2 is the second generation of the digital terrestrial television broadcasting system which transmits composite (compressed digital audio and video) signal and other data in an MPEG-4 transport stream, using coded orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (COFDM or OFDM) modulation. DVB-T2 uses multiple MPEG-4 transport streams and have enhanced FEC and higher QAM (256-QAM) constellations. Tanzania switched from analogue to Digital Video Broadcasting Terrestrial second generation (DVB-T2) in 2013, since the official switching there has been complaints from the DVB-T2 users on the coverage and quality of service provided. In this paper we evaluated the DVB-T2 performance and make the recommendations on the ways to optimize the performance. Through measurements it has been observed that, the quality of coverage in some areas (locations) is poor, so to improve the received signal strength coverage and quality we recommend the use of enhanced Yagi-Uda antenna gain which is going to be designed. Keywords: DVB-T2, Received Signal Strength Indicator (RSSI), Bit Error Rate (BER), Carrier to Noise Ratio (CNR), Modulation Error Rate (MER), Polarization, Yagi-Uda antenna