Date: 30 0ctober 2012

Time: 9:00 a.m.

Duration: 3 Hours
This document includes 4 pages

Majeure Tlcommunications MAJ1

and
Master Program SAR C3

EXAM
Principles of Digital Communications
Important note: Use of calculators, lecture notes and personal notes of the students is allowed for
this exam, but the text books are not allowed. The answers to PART I and PART II must be given on
separate sheets.

PART I:
1) Consider a baseband signal of the form a t a k t kT , where t is the Dirac delta

pulse, T is the symbol duration, and a k designate uncorrelated symbols taking their values

from the alphabet A. This signal passes through a linear encoder whose z-domain
transfer function is H z 1 z 2 followed by an ideal low-pass filter of bandwidth

21T , 21T . The filter output is denoted st . Write the expression of the power spectrum

density of s t .

2) How would you decode this type of signal at the receiver? Sketch the receiver block
diagram and comment the operation of the receiver. If you can think of different alternatives
for the decoder, describe all of them and make comparisons.
3) Consider the following 16-state modulations: 16-ASK, 16-PSK and 16-QAM. For each of
them, express the minimum distance as a function of the average signal power. Knowing
that the minimum distance determines the bit error probability for a given noise power, how
would you rank these 3 modulations? Express the respective signal-to-noise ratio (SNR)
losses in dB. What general conclusions can you reach from this comparison concerning the
ASK, PSK and QAM modulations?
4) Consider an additive white Gaussian noise channel over the frequency band of (960 980
MHz). On this channel, we wish to use a quadrature amplitude modulation (QAM) and
achieve a bit error rate (BER) lower than 10-6. What is the maximum achievable bit rate
assuming an Eb/N0 of 16 dB and Nyquist filtering with roll-off factor 0.25? Which

modulation must be used to achieve this bit rate? What is the maximum achievable bit rate
for Eb/N0 = 16 dB? With which modulation?
5) Consider an OFDM system with 64 carriers. The input symbol block to the Inverse DFT is
denoted (a 0 , a1 , a 2 ,....., a N 1 ) . The channel is a 2-path wireless communications channel
characterized by the impulse response ht t . t T , where T denotes the symbol

period (the block duration is NT) and is a constant between 0 and 1. Plot the channel
amplitude response H f versus frequency. Next, assuming that the first symbol in the
block is transmitted at frequency f 0 such that H f 0 1 , express the SNR loss at the
receiver (after propagation over the given 2-path channel) for each of the symbol in the
block (a 0 , a1 , a 2 ,....., a N 1 ) . Can you describe an OFDM system in which different powers
are allocated to different symbols in such a way that the SNR at the receiver is constant (the
same for all symbols in the block)? How would you allocate the power for the channel given
above? What happens if the constant goes to 1?

PART II:
Exercise 1
The received signal for antipodal signaling over a Rayleigh fading is
and

where

. It is known that under coherent detection, the error probability pe

decreases like 1/SNR.

1. A precise way of saying that pe decays like 1/SNR with increasing SNR is the following:
where c is a constant.
Identify the value of c for the Rayleigh fading channel.
2. Now we change the fading distribution. Suppose that | | has an arbitrary continuous pdf f
satisfying f(0)>0.
Give the value of c as a function of f(0).
Hint: you may need to interchange limit and integration in your calculations. You can
assume that this can be done without worrying about making a rigorous justification.
3. Suppose now we have L independent branches of diversitiy with gains
having an arbitrary distribution as in the previous part.
Give the value of
| |

, and | |

as a function of g1(0),, gL(0), where gl is the pdf of

Hint 1: the pdf of the sum of two independent variable is the convolution of their pdf. For
, we can write:

where is the pdf of | |

Hint 2:

| .

Exercise 2
We consider a DS spread spectrum system in the presence of CW jamming interference.
a) Compare the error rate performance when the signal pulse is:

(the energy of this pulse energy in low pass band is

2.Ec )
to the error rate performance when the signal pulse is rectangular.
b) Compare it also to the case where the CW interference is replaced by a broadband
interference with the same total interfering power in the band W=1/Tc.