Convolutional code

Coding is a technique where redundancy is added to original bit sequence to increase the reliability of the communication. In this article, lets discuss a simple binary convolutional coding scheme at the transmitter and the associated Viterbi (maximum likelihood) decoding scheme at the receiver. Update: For some reason, the blog is unable to display the…

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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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Quiz on IEEE 802.11a specifications

The IEEE 802.11a specifications are used by many to understand a wireless communication link built using OFDM. In this post, I have put together a set of 10 multiple choice questions based on 802.11a specifications. The questions are on the building blocks in 802.11a specifications, preamble structure and so on. Upon completion of the quiz,…

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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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GATE-2012 ECE Q52 (electromagnetics)

Question 52 on electromagnetics from GATE (Graduate Aptitude Test in Engineering) 2012 Electronics and Communication Engineering paper. An infinitely long uniform solid wire of radius  carries a uniform dc current of density . Q52. The magnetic field at a distance  from the center of the wire is proportional to (A)  for and for (B)  for  and  for  (C)  for  and  for  (D)  for  and  for  Solution…

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Scaling factor in QAM

When QAM (Quadrature Amplitude Modulation) is used, typically one may find a scaling factor associated with the constellation mapping operation. It may be reasonably obvious that this scaling factor is for normalizing the average energy to one. This post attempts to compute the average energy of the 16-QAM, 64-QAM and M-QAM constellation (where is a…

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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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