My friend and colleague Mr. Vineet Srivastava pointed me to a nice article on clock jitter – Clock Jitter Effects on Sampling : A tutorial – by Carlos Azeredo-Leme, IEEE Circuits and Systems Magazine, Third Quarter 2011. In this post, let us discuss the total Signal to Noise Ratio at the output of an analog to…
In a previous post (here), we discussed in brief, Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM) transmission. Let us know probe bit more into the motivation of cyclic prefix (aka guard interval) associated with each OFDM symbol. What is cyclic prefix? Let us consider one subcarrier (subcarrier +1 specified in IEEE 802.11a specification) alone. In the figure…
In the previous post on transmit filtering using Nyquist pulse, we had briefly learned that the information symbol with a symbol period can be transmitted without inter symbol interference (ISI) by using Nyquist pulse, . The resultant waveform is ideally bandlimited to frequencies from Hz to Hz. However, in typical transmission schemes, we do not…
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…
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…
Let us try to understand peak to average power ratio (PAPR) and its typical value in an OFDM system specified per IEEE 802.11a specifications. What is PAPR? The peak to average power ratio for a signal is defined as , where corresponds to the conjugate operator. Expressing in deciBels, .
Minimum shift keying (MSK) is an important concept to learn in digital communications. It is a form of continuous phase frequency shift keying . In minimum phase shift keying, two key concepts are used. (a) The frequency separation of the sinusoidals used for representing bits 1’s and 0’s are , where is the symbol period….
Equivalence of Moving Average and CIC filter Let me briefly share my understanding on the cascaded integrator comb (CIC) filter, thanks to the nice article. For understanding the cascaded integrator comb (CIC) filter, firstly let us understand the moving average filter, which is accumulation latest samples of an input sequence .
An earlier post we discussed hard decision decoding for a Hamming (7,4) code and simulated the the bit error rate. In this post, let us focus on the soft decision decoding for the Hamming (7,4) code, and quantify the bounds in the performance gain.
Some among you will be aware that in a wireless link having multiple antenna’s at the receiver (aka receive diversity) improves the bit error rate (BER) performance. In this post, let us try to understand the BER improvement with receive diversity. And, since we are just getting started, let us limit ourselves to additive white…
In two previous posts, we have derived theoretical symbol error rate for 16-QAM and 16-PSK modulation schemes. The links are: (a) Symbol error rate for 16-PSK (b) Symbol error rate for 16-QAM Given that we are transmitting the same number of constellation points in both 16-PSK and 16-QAM, let us try to understand the better…
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,…
In the recent past, we have discussed three receive diversity schemes – Selection combining, Equal Gain Combining and Maximal Ratio Combining. All the three approaches used the antenna array at the receiver to improve the demodulation performance, albeit with different levels of complexity. Time to move on to a transmit diversity scheme where the information…
Post describes about the need for I-Q modulation by comparing the spectral efficiency of passband PAM and passband QAM.