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…
Polyphase filters for interpolation
In typical digital signal processing applications, there arises need to increase the sampling frequency of a signal sequence, where the higher sampling frequency is an integer multiple of the original sampling frequency i.e for a signal sequence with a sampling frequency , change the sampling frequency to , where is an integer.
MIMO with ML equalization
We have discussed quite a few receiver structures for a 2×2 MIMO channel namely, (a) Zero Forcing (ZF) equalization (b) Minimum Mean Square Error (MMSE) equalization (c) Zero Forcing equalization with Successive Interference Cancellation (ZF-SIC) (d) ZF-SIC with optimal ordering and (e) MIMO with MMSE SIC and optimal ordering From the above receiver structures, we…
Migrated to Amazon EC2 instance (from shared hosting)
Being not too happy with the speed of the shared hosting, decided to move the blog to an Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instance. Given this is a baby step, picked up a micro instance running an Ubuntu server and installed Apache web server, MySQL, PHP . After doing a bit of tweaking with this new…
Bounds on Communication based on Shannon’s capacity
This is the second post in the series aimed at developing a better understanding of Shannon’s capacity equation. In this post let us discuss the bounds on communication given the signal power and bandwidth constraint. Further, the following writeup is based on Section 12.6 from Fundamentals of Communication Systems by John G. Proakis, Masoud Salehi
Derivation of BPSK BER in Rayleigh channel
This is a guest post by Jose Antonio Urigüen who is an Electrical and Electronic Engineer currently studying an MSc in Communications and Signal Processing at Imperial College in London. This guest post has been created due to his own curiosity when reviewing some concepts of BER for BPSK in Rayleigh channnel published in the…
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…
Harmonic distortion in digital sinusoidal generators
In Problem 4.36 of DSP-Proakis [1], the task is to provide insights into harmonic distortion which may be present in practical sinusoidal generators. Consider the signal , where . My take: The discrete time signal of fundamental period can consist of frequency components separated by radians or cycles (Refer Section4.2 in [1]). The Fourier series…
Newton’s method to find square root, inverse
Some of us would have used Newton’s method (also known as Newton-Raphson method) in some form or other. The method has quite a bit of history, starting with the Babylonian way of finding the square root and later over centuries reaching the present recursive way of finding the solution. In this post, we will describe…
GATE-2012 ECE Q28 (electromagnetics)
Question 28 on electromagnetics from GATE (Graduate Aptitude Test in Engineering) 2012 Electronics and Communication Engineering paper. Q28. A transmission line with a characteristic impedance of 100 is used to match a 50 section to a 200 section. If the matching is to be done both at 429MHz and 1GHz, the length of the transmission line can be approximately (A) 82.5cm…
BER for BPSK in Rayleigh channel
Long back in time we discussed the BER (bit error rate) for BPSK modulation in a simple AWGN channel (time stamps states August 2007). Almost an year back! It high time we discuss the BER for BPSK in a Rayleigh multipath channel. In a brief discussion on Rayleigh channel, wherein we stated that a circularly…
Gradients for Binary Classification with Sigmoid
In a classification problem, the output (also called the label or class) takes a small number of discrete values rather than continuous values. For a simple binary classification problem, where output takes only two discrete values : 0 or 1, the sigmoid function can be used to transform the output of a linear regression model…
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…