Ph. D. Admission Exam.

Attempt all question A. Undergraduate Level

Part II Communications
January 9, 2012

1. a) What is the advantage of return-to-zero signaling in digital baseband transmission? b) Define ISI. Illustrate your answer with an eye diagram. State any necessary conditions on the channel frequency response and the decision sampling instant for zero ISI? c) A binary PCM system uses polar return-to-zero signaling to transmit equally likely symbols 1 & 0; represented by rectangular pulses of amplitude +A and duration Tb/2 at a symbol rate 1/Tb. The channel noise is modeled as AWGN with zero mean and power spectral density No/2. Find an expression for the average probability of error using a matched filter receiver. Sketch the power spectral density of the transmitted signal. d) What is the roll-off factor of a raised-cosine filter that limits the transmission bandwidth of the above signaling system to 2/Tb and results in zero ISI? B. Graduate Level 2. The scattering function S( ) for a fading multipath channel is nonzero for the range of values 0 < < 1 ms and -0.1 Hz < < 0.1 Hz. Assume that the scattering function is approximately uniform in the two variables. a) Give numerical values for the following parameters: (i) The multipath spread of the channel. (ii) The Doppler spread of the channel. (iii) The coherence time of the channel. (iv) The coherence bandwidth of the channel. (v) The spread factor of the channel. b) Explain the meaning of the following, taking into consideration the answers given in (a): (i) The channel is frequency-nonselective. (ii) The channel is slowly fading. (iii) The channel is frequency-selective. c) Suppose that we have a frequency allocation (bandwidth) of 10 kHz and we wish to transmit at a rate of 100 bits over this channel. Design a binary communication system with frequency diversity. In particular, specify (i) The type of modulation. (ii) The number of subchannels. (iii) The frequency separation between adjacent carriers. (iv) The signaling interval used in your design. Justify your choice of parameters.