Physical Layer Time Interleaving for the ATSC 3.0 System

This paper presents optimized time interleaving which has been adopted for the Advanced Television System Committee 3.0 system as a physical layer tool to mitigate the effects of burst errors. The adopted time interleaver (TI) is very flexible and can have different configurations according to the number of physical layer pipes (PLPs) and service type, i.e., fixed, portable, and mobile. Notably, for single-PLP mode a sheer convolutional TI (CTI) is used, whereas for the multiple-PLP mode a hybrid TI (HTI) composed of cell interleaver, twisted block interleaver, and a convolutional delay-line is used. Optionally, the CTI and the HTI can be used in conjunction with extended time interleaving and a cell interleaver (only for HTI) to further improve robustness over long burst error lengths at the expense of latency.