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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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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Closed form solution for linear regression

In the previous post on Batch Gradient Descent and Stochastic Gradient Descent, we looked at two iterative methods for finding the parameter vector  which minimizes the square of the error between the predicted value  and the actual output  for all  values in the training set. A closed form solution for finding the parameter vector  is possible, and in this post…

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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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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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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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