Receive diversity in AWGN

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…

Read More

OT: Happy Schools Blog

Mr. Raghuram contacted me and informed about Happy Schools Blog. He writes about Graduate School Admission in U.S., Job opportunities for students, University Selection based on his personal experience. He recently published few articles which might of interest to some of our readers. Here are the URL for few articles:

Read More

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)…

Read More

GATE-2012 ECE Q24 (math)

Question 24 on math from GATE (Graduate Aptitude Test in Engineering) 2012 Electronics and Communication Engineering paper. Q24. Two independent random variables X and Y are uniformly distributed in the interval [-1, 1]. The probability that max[X,Y] is less than 1/2 is (A) 3/4 (B) 9/16 (C) 1/4 (D) 2/3

Read More

Closed form solution for linear regression

In the previous post on Batch Gradient Descent and Stochastic Gradient Descent, we looked at two iterative methods for finding the parameter vector  which minimizes the square of the error between the predicted value  and the actual output  for all  values in the training set. A closed form solution for finding the parameter vector  is possible, and in this post…

Read More

Symbol Error Rate (SER) for QPSK (4-QAM) modulation

Given that we have discussed symbol error rate probability for a 4-PAM modulation, let us know focus on finding the symbol error probability for a QPSK (4-QAM) modulation scheme. Background Consider that the alphabets used for a QPSK (4-QAM) is (Refer example 5-35 in [DIG-COMM-BARRY-LEE-MESSERSCHMITT]). Download free e-Book discussing theoretical and simulated error rates for…

Read More

Alamouti STBC

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…

Read More

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…

Read More

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…

Read More