Viterbi decoder

Coding is a technique where redundancy is added to original bit sequence to increase the reliability of the communication. 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 article which discuss…

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GATE-2012 ECE Q15 (communication)

Question 15 on communication from GATE (Graduate Aptitude Test in Engineering) 2012 Electronics and Communication Engineering paper. Q15. A source alphabet consists of N symbols with the probability of the first two symbols being the same. A source encoder increases the probability of the first symbol by a small amount  and decreases that of the…

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Sigma delta modulation

In an earlier post, it was mentioned that delta modulator without the quantizer is identical to convolving an input sequence with . Let us first try to validate that thought using a small MATLAB example and using the delta modulator circuit shown in Figure 9.13a of DSP-Proakis [1]. % delta modulation xn = sin(2*pi*1/64*[0:63]); xhatn…

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Transmit beamforming

In this post lets discuss a closed-loop transmit diversity scheme, where the transmitter has the knowledge of the channel. As there is a feedback path required from the receiver, to communicate the channel seen by the receiver to the transmitter, the scheme is called closed-loop transmit diversity scheme. Recall that the transmit diversity using Space…

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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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MIMO with MMSE SIC and optimal ordering

This post attempts to build further on the MIMO equalization schemes which we have discussed – (a) Minimum Mean Square Error (MMSE) equalization, (b) Zero Forcing equalization with Successive Interference Cancellation (ZF-SIC) and (c) ZF-SIC with optimal ordering. We have learned that successive interference cancellation with optimal ordering improves the performance with Zero Forcing equalization….

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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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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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