Alamouti STBC

In the recent past, we have discussed three receive diversity schemes – Selection combining, Equal Gain Combining and Maximal Ratio Combining. All the three approaches used the antenna array at the receiver to improve the demodulation performance, albeit with different levels of complexity. Time to move on to a transmit diversity scheme where the information…

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Matlab or C for Viterbi Decoder?

Are you bothered by speed of the speed of the simulations which you develop in Matlab/Octave? I was not bothered much, till I ran into the Viterbi decoder. If you recall, the Matlab/Octave simulation script for BER computation with hard soft decision Viterbi algorithm provided in post Viterbi with finite survivor state memory took around…

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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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OCW: Communication System Design

While browsing through the web for materials on the wireless communication and implementation, found this rich set of articles as part of MIT OPEN COURSEWARE program. The course is from Vladimir Stojanovic, course materials for 6.973 Communication System Design, Spring 2006. MIT OpenCourseWare (http://ocw.mit.edu/), Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

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Support Vibha’s Dream Mile event

My friend Mr. Balaji volunteers for Vibha, a non-profit  organization whose mission is to ensure that every underprivileged child attains his or her right to education, health and opportunity. Vibha, which was founded in 1991 has a volunteer network of 825 members spread across Atlanta, Austin, Bay Area, Boston, Chicago, Dallas, Houston, Jacksonville, Los Angeles,…

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GATE-2012 ECE Q11 (signals)

Question 11 on signals from GATE (Graduate Aptitude Test in Engineering) 2012 Electronics and Communication Engineering paper. Q11. The unilateral Laplace transform of is . The unilateral Laplace transform ofis (A)  (B)  (C)  (D)  Solution From the definition of Laplace transform for a function defined for all real numbers  is,  , where  with real numbers  and . To find the Laplace…

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