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…

Read More

GATE-2012 ECE Q38 (communication)

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)…

Read More

Quiz on IEEE 802.11a specifications

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,…

Read More

GATE-2012 ECE Q15 (communication)

Question 15 on communication from GATE (Graduate Aptitude Test in Engineering) 2012 Electronics and Communication Engineering paper. Q15. A source alphabet consists of N symbols with the probability of the first two symbols being the same. A source encoder increases the probability of the first symbol by a small amount  and decreases that of the…

Read More

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.

Read More

Transmit beamforming

In this post lets discuss a closed-loop transmit diversity scheme, where the transmitter has the knowledge of the channel. As there is a feedback path required from the receiver, to communicate the channel seen by the receiver to the transmitter, the scheme is called closed-loop transmit diversity scheme. Recall that the transmit diversity using Space…

Read More

Understanding an OFDM transmission

Let us try to understand simulation of a typical Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM) transmission defined per IEEE 802.11a specification. Orthogonal pulses In a previous post (here ), we have understood that the minimum frequency separation for two sinusoidals with arbitrary phases to be orthogonal is , where is the symbol period. In Orthogonal Frequency…

Read More