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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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 Q36 (math)

Question 36 on math from GATE (Graduate Aptitude Test in Engineering) 2012 Electronics and Communication Engineering paper. Q36. A fair coin is tossed till a head appears for the first time. The probability that the number of required tosses is odd, is (A) 1/3 (B) 1/2 (C) 2/3 (D) 3/4 Solution Let us start by…

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GATE-2012 ECE Q7 (digital)

Question 7 on digital from GATE (Graduate Aptitude Test in Engineering) 2012 Electronics and Communication Engineering paper. Q7. The output Y of a 2-bit comparator is logic 1 whenever the 2 bit input A is greater than 2 bit input B. The number of combinations for which output is logic 1 is (A) 4 (B)…

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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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BPSK BER with OFDM modulation

Oflate, I am getting frequent requests for bit error rate simulations using OFDM (Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing) modulation. In this post, we will discuss a simple OFDM transmitter and receiver, find the relation between Eb/No (Bit to Noise ratio) and Es/No (Signal to Noise ratio) and compute the bit error rate with BPSK.

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GATE-2012 ECE Q12 (math)

Question 12 on math from GATE (Graduate Aptitude Test in Engineering) 2012 Electronics and Communication Engineering paper. Q12. With initial condition  the solution of the differential equation,  is (A) (B) (C) (D) Solution From the product rule used to find the derivative of product of two or more functions, Applying this to the above equation, we…

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BER with Matched Filtering

In the post on transmit pulse shaping filter, we had discussed pulse shaping using rectangular and sinc. In this post we will discuss about optimal receiver structure when pulse shaping is used at the transmitter. The receiver structure is also called as matched filter. For the discussion, we will assume rectangular pulse shaping, the channel…

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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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