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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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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Blog on DSP

I happened to visit ‘The Digital Signal Processing Blog’, maintained by Mr. Andres Kwasinski, Ph. D. In the blog one can find details about the upcoming IEEE conferences pertaining to communication and multimedia processing. Further, in some of the posts, author shares his thoughts on topics like fixed point arithmetic (here) and wavelets (here) etc….

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GATE-2012 ECE Q47 (math)

Question 47 on math from GATE (Graduate Aptitude Test in Engineering) 2012 Electronics and Communication Engineering paper. Q47. Given that and , the value of is (A)  (B)  (C)  (D)  Solution To answer this question, we need to refer to Cayley Hamilton Theorem. This is discussed briefly in Pages 310-311 of Introduction to Linear Algebra, Glibert Strang (buy…

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Oscillator phase noise

Oscillators are used in typical radio circuits to drive the mixer used for the up-conversion or down-conversion of the passband transmission. Ideally, the spectrum of the oscillator is expected to have an impulse at the frequency of oscillation with no frequency components else where. However the spectrum of practical oscillators do have spectrum skirts around…

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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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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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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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