  The European second generation digital video broadcasting standard (DVB-T2)
introduces a P1 symbol. This P1 symbol facilitates the coarse synchronization
and carries 7-bit transmission parameter signaling (TPS), including the fast
Fourier transform size, single-input/single-output and
multiple-input/single-output transmission modes, etc. However, this P1 symbol
suffers from obvious performance loss over fading channels. In this paper, an
improved preamble scheme is proposed, where a pair of optimal m sequences are
inserted into the frequency domain. One sequence is used for carrier frequency
offset (CFO) estimation, and the other carries TPS to inform the receiver about
the transmission configuration parameters. Compared with the conventional
preamble scheme, the proposed preamble improves CFO estimation performance and
the signaling capacity. Meanwhile, without additional overhead, the proposed
scheme exploits more active pilots than the conventional schemes. In this way,
it can facilitate the channel estimation, improve the frame synchronization
accuracy as well as enhance its robustness to frequency selective fading
channels.
