A discrete-time PLL with a PI loop filter and an NCO consisting of a phase accumulator and a Look-Up Table (LUT)
Wireless/SDR

Phase Locked Loop (PLL) in a Software Defined Radio (SDR)

IBM Watson and Google DeepMind are the most complex computers that, some believe, will try to run the world in a distant future. A PLL on the other hand is the simplest computer that actually runs so much of the world as a fundamental component of intelligent electronic circuits. The PLL was invented by the French engineer Henri de Bellescize in 1932 when he published his first implementation in the French journal L’Onde Electrique. A Phase Locked Loop (PLL) is a device used to synchronize a periodic waveform with a reference periodic waveform. In essence, it is an automatic control

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Future predictions
Machine Learning

Machine Learning – The Big Picture

Machine learning is probably the defining technology of the past decade. As with all walks of life, it is playing an increasingly significant role in existing and future wireless networks. In this article, we explore the big picture of this exciting field. Nature vs Man Humans have always been interested in the workings of a mind, replicated by machines in many science fiction stories. During their investigations on Artificial Intelligence (AI, of which machine learning is a subset), many scientists observed that the machines need not copy the exact brain but a functional level performance is good enough that can

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Known training sequence (a preamble) is prepended, or training can also be inserted periodically within the message
Wireless/SDR

Basics of Synchronization

In every digital communication system, the Tx has the easier role of signal generation while the Rx has the tougher job of figuring out the intended message. Just like solving a puzzle told by someone. Estimating and compensating for the frequency, phase and timing offsets between Tx and Rx oscillators is one such challenge. The solution can be designed depending on many factors such as some part of data is known (called a ‘training sequence’) or not, the synchronizer needs to be one-shot or continuously updating, and so on. Known Data Availability Depending on the availability of known data, synchronization

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A view of time-frequency-space grid in a communication system
Wireless/SDR

How Multiple Antennas Sample the Signal

Once upon a time, an antenna was viewed as a simple device to transmit and receive an electromagnetic wave, much like a battery the sole purpose of which is to provide electrical power. A set of antennas, however, can be viewed from a new angle as follows. Sampling in Time Domain An Analog-to-Digital Converter (ADC) is a device that samples an analog signal in time domain to create a corresponding sequence of numbers. Similarly, a Digital-to-Analog Converter (DAC) gets a sequence of numbers as an input to generate a reconstructed analog signal. As an example, a rectangular pulse shape is

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Eye diagram for a 4-QAM modulated signal and a simple channel impulse response
Wireless/SDR

Impact of Multipath on the Received Signal

In this article, we describe the impact of multipath caused by the wireless channel on the signal arriving at the receiver from a constellation viewpoint. Recall that an eye diagram, a transition diagram and a scatter plot are the stethoscopes of a communication system and hence it is imperative to bring in that perspective for a Tx signal convolved with the channel impulse response. This is because a wireless channel can be seen as a Finite Impulse Response (FIR) filter with the result that the sampled Rx signal is a convolution between taps of this FIR filter and the Tx

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