Convolutional code

Coding is a technique where redundancy is added to original bit sequence to increase the reliability of the communication. In this article, 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…

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Solved objective questions (GATE)

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…

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GATE-2012 ECE Q3 (communication)

Question 3 on Communication from GATE (Graduate Aptitude Test in Engineering) 2012 Electronics and Communication Engineering paper. Q3. In a baseband communications link, frequencies upto 3500Hz are used for signalling. Using a raised cosine pulse with 75% excess bandwidth and for no inter-symbol interference, the maximum possible signaling rate in symbols per second is, (A)…

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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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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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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…

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Linear to log conversion

In signal processing blocks like power estimation used in digital communication, it may be required to represent the estimate in log scale. This post explains a simple linear to log conversion scheme proposed in the DSP Guru column on DSP Trick: Quick-and-Dirty Logarithms. The scheme makes implementation of a linear to log conversion simple and…

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