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…

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Bit Error Rate (BER) for frequency shift keying with coherent demodulation

Following the request by Siti Naimah, this post discuss the bit error probability for coherent demodulation of binary Frequency Shift Keying (BFSK) along with a small Matlab code snippet. Using the definition provided in Sec 4.4.4 of [DIG-COMM-SKLAR]), in binary Frequency shift keying (BFSK), the bits 0’s and 1’s are represented by signals and having…

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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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Matlab or C for Viterbi Decoder?

Are you bothered by speed of the speed of the simulations which you develop in Matlab/Octave? I was not bothered much, till I ran into the Viterbi decoder. If you recall, the Matlab/Octave simulation script for BER computation with hard soft decision Viterbi algorithm provided in post Viterbi with finite survivor state memory took around…

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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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