Month: August 2008

BER for BPSK in OFDM with Rayleigh multipath channel

Mr. Lealem Tamirat, in a comment on BER for BPSK in Rayleigh channel, wondered about the performance of an OFDM modulated system in a frequency selective Rayeligh fading channel. My response was that,

Though the total channel is a frequency selective channel, the channel experienced by each subcarrier in an OFDM system is a flat fading channel with each subcarrier experiencing independent Rayleigh fading.

So, assuming that the number of taps in the channel is lower than the cyclic prefix duration (which ensures that there is no inter symbol interference), the BER for BPSK with OFDM in a Rayleigh fading channel should be same as the result obtained for BER for BPSK in Rayleigh fading channel.

Let us try to define a quick simulation to confirm the claim.

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Receive diversity in AWGN

Some among you will be aware that in a wireless link having multiple antenna’s at the receiver (aka receive diversity) improves the bit error rate (BER) performance. In this post, let us try to understand the BER improvement with receive diversity. And, since we are just getting started, let us limit ourselves to additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN) channel (i.e assume that the channel gains are unity).

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BER for BPSK in Rayleigh channel

Long back in time we discussed the BER (bit error rate) for BPSK modulation in a simple AWGN channel (time stamps states August 2007). Almost an year back! It high time we discuss the BER for BPSK in a Rayleigh multipath channel.

In a brief discussion on Rayleigh channel, wherein we stated that a circularly symmetric complex Gaussian random variable is of the form,

,

where real and imaginary parts are zero mean independent and identically distributed (iid) Gaussian random variables with mean 0 and variance .

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Negative Frequency

Last week, I received an email from Mr. Kishore. He was wondering about the physical significance of negative frequency. Does negative frequency really exist?

Though I have seen conflicting views on the net (thread in complextoreal.com, thread in comp.dsp), my perspective is that negative frequency exist. The concept of negative frequency helps me a lot to understand single sideband modulation (SSB), OFDM systems, I Q modulators etc (to name a few).

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Summary – feedback on [dspLog], July 2008

On July30th, 2008 I had sent a request for feedback to 93 subscribers who have opted to receive articles over email. As on 3rd August, I received the response from around 8 persons. Not bad, around 8.5% response. Thanks a lot for the feedback. I will summarize the response from the group and note down the action items on me.

Best in [dspLog]

The majority of the people (6) found the theoretical description to be the most useful and around 3 people found the Matlab/Octave code to be the most useful. A comment came from Mr. Eddie Maalouf who suggested that we should start encourage user participation where other engineers can help to solve technical problems etc.

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