GATE-2012 ECE Q46 (math)

Question 46 on math from GATE (Graduate Aptitude Test in Engineering) 2012 Electronics and Communication Engineering paper. Q46. The maximum value of  in the interval [1, 6] is (A) 21 (B) 25 (C) 41 (D) 46 Solution Let us start by finding the critical points of the function . The first derivative is, . Solving by…

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Deriving PDF of Rayleigh random variable

In the post on Rayleigh channel model, we stated that a circularly symmetric random variable is of the form , where real and imaginary parts are zero mean independent and identically distributed (iid) Gaussian random variables. The magnitude which has the probability density, is called a Rayleigh random variable. Further, the phase is uniformly distributed from…

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Maximal Ratio Combining (MRC)

This is the third post in the series discussing receiver diversity in a wireless link. Receiver diversity is a form of space diversity, where there are multiple antennas at the receiver. The presence of receiver diversity poses an interesting problem – how do we use ‘effectively‘ the information from all the antennas to demodulate the…

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MIMO with ML equalization

We have discussed quite a few receiver structures for a 2×2 MIMO channel namely, (a) Zero Forcing (ZF) equalization (b) Minimum Mean Square Error (MMSE) equalization (c) Zero Forcing equalization with Successive Interference Cancellation (ZF-SIC) (d) ZF-SIC with optimal ordering and (e) MIMO with MMSE SIC and optimal ordering From the above receiver structures, we…

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Batch Gradient Descent

I happened to stumble on Prof. Andrew Ng’s Machine Learning classes which are available online as part of Stanford Center for Professional Development. The first lecture in the series discuss the topic of fitting parameters for a given data set using linear regression.  For understanding this concept, I chose to take data from the top…

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Stochastic Gradient Descent

For curve fitting using linear regression, there exists a minor variant of Batch Gradient Descent algorithm, called Stochastic Gradient Descent. In the Batch Gradient Descent, the parameter vector  is updated as, . (loop over all elements of training set in one iteration) For Stochastic Gradient Descent, the vector gets updated as, at each iteration the…

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Chi Square Random Variable

While trying to derive the theoretical bit error rate (BER) for BPSK modulation in a Rayleigh fading channel, I realized that I need to discuss chi square random variable prior. What is chi-square random variable? Let there be independent and identically distributed Gaussian random variables with mean and variance and we form a new random…

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Understanding an OFDM transmission

Let us try to understand simulation of a typical Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM) transmission defined per IEEE 802.11a specification. Orthogonal pulses In a previous post (here ), we have understood that the minimum frequency separation for two sinusoidals with arbitrary phases to be orthogonal is , where is the symbol period. In Orthogonal Frequency…

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