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…
Following the discussion on thermal noise and it’s modeling and noise figure computation for a simple resistor network, in this article let us discuss the Noise Figure of cascaded stages.
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…
It might be interesting to interpret the output of the fft() function in Matlab. Consider the following simple examples. fsMHz = 20; % sampling frequency fcMHz = 1.5625; % signal frequency N = 128; % fft size % generating the time domain signal x1T = exp(j*2*pi*fcMHz*[0:N-1]/fsMHz); x1F = fft(x1T,N); % 128 pt FFT figure; plot([-N/2:N/2-1]*fsMHz/N,fftshift(abs(x1F)))…
We have discussed about probable transmit pulse shaping filter and have observed that raised cosine filtering filtering allows a simpler implementation, albeit at the cost of increased bandwidth. Let us know understand the eye diagram, which is a useful graphical tool to quantify the degradation of the signal due to filtering. Eye diagram An eye…
TETRA (TErrestrial Trunked RAdio) is a wireless specification intended to be used by government agencies, public health services, rail transport, military etc. TETRA specification comes from ETSI (European Telecommunication Standards Institute). We plan to start a post series on the building blocks of TETRA physical layer and radio specifications and this is the first post…
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…
Let us try to understand the formula for Channel Capacity with an Average Power Limitation, described in Section 25 of the landmark paper A Mathematical Theory for Communication, by Mr. Claude Shannon. Further, the following writeup is based on Section 12.5.1 from Fundamentals of Communication Systems by John G. Proakis, Masoud Salehi
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,…
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…
Using the services of a new author ‘RV’, we are starting a new series of articles in the blog. Typically in India, many of the competitive examinations pertaining to Engineering (GATE, IES) and rectuitment by private and public sector companies (ISRO, BSNL, BEL, BHEL) uses examination with objective questions for the first level screening. We…
Given that we have discussed symbol error rate probability for a 4-PAM modulation, let us know focus on finding the symbol error probability for a QPSK (4-QAM) modulation scheme. Background Consider that the alphabets used for a QPSK (4-QAM) is (Refer example 5-35 in [DIG-COMM-BARRY-LEE-MESSERSCHMITT]). Download free e-Book discussing theoretical and simulated error rates for…
Question 38 on Communication from GATE (Graduate Aptitude Test in Engineering) 2012 Electronics and Communication Engineering paper. Q38. A binary symmetric channel (BSC) has a transition probability of 1/8. If the binary transmit symbol X is such that P(X=0)=9/10, then the probability of error for an optimum receiver will be (A) 7/80 (B) 63/80 (C)…
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…