Bit Error Rate (BER) for frequency shift keying with coherent demodulation

Following the request by Siti Naimah, this post discuss the bit error probability for coherent demodulation of binary Frequency Shift Keying (BFSK) along with a small Matlab code snippet. Using the definition provided in Sec 4.4.4 of [DIG-COMM-SKLAR]), in binary Frequency shift keying (BFSK), the bits 0’s and 1’s are represented by signals and having…

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Selection Diversity

This is the first 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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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…

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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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GATE-2012 ECE Q3 (communication)

Question 3 on Communication from GATE (Graduate Aptitude Test in Engineering) 2012 Electronics and Communication Engineering paper. Q3. In a baseband communications link, frequencies upto 3500Hz are used for signalling. Using a raised cosine pulse with 75% excess bandwidth and for no inter-symbol interference, the maximum possible signaling rate in symbols per second is, (A)…

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GATE-2012 ECE Q39 (communication)

Question 39 on communication from GATE (Graduate Aptitude Test in Engineering) 2012 Electronics and Communication Engineering paper. Q39. The signal  as shown is applied both to  a phase modulator (with  as the phase constant) and a frequency modulator (with as the frequency constant) having the same carrier frequency.  The ratio  for the same maximum phase deviation is,…

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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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GATE-2012 ECE Q2 (communication)

Question 52 on communication from GATE (Graduate Aptitude Test in Engineering) 2012 Electronics and Communication Engineering paper. Q2. The power spectral density of a real process for positive frequencies is shown below. The values of  and , respectively are (A)  (B)  (C)  (D)  Solution For a wide sense stationary function, the auto-correlation with delay  is defined as,…

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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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