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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OCW: Communication System Design

While browsing through the web for materials on the wireless communication and implementation, found this rich set of articles as part of MIT OPEN COURSEWARE program. The course is from Vladimir Stojanovic, course materials for 6.973 Communication System Design, Spring 2006. MIT OpenCourseWare (http://ocw.mit.edu/), Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

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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…

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Stochastic Gradient Descent

For curve fitting using linear regression, there exists a minor variant of Batch Gradient Descent algorithm, called Stochastic Gradient Descent. In the Batch Gradient Descent, the parameter vector  is updated as, . (loop over all elements of training set in one iteration) For Stochastic Gradient Descent, the vector gets updated as, at each iteration the…

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Batch Gradient Descent

I happened to stumble on Prof. Andrew Ng’s Machine Learning classes which are available online as part of Stanford Center for Professional Development. The first lecture in the series discuss the topic of fitting parameters for a given data set using linear regression.  For understanding this concept, I chose to take data from the top…

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Six equalizers for V-BLAST

In the past, we had discussed several posts on two transmit two receive MIMO communication, where the transmission was based on V-BLAST. The details about V-BLAST can be read from the landmark paper V-BLAST: An architeture for realizing very high data rates over the rich scattering wireless channel – P. W. Wolniansky, G. J. Foschini,…

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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…

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