ECE 3125 ~ ECE 3242 – Additional Practice Problems

Dec 17, 2012

• What two requirements must be fulfilled in order to ensure distortion-
less transmission through a linear system? (Section 1.6.3)
• In the process of formatting information, why is it desirable to perform
over-sampling? (Section 2.4.3)
• In the case of baseband signaling, the received waveforms are already in
a pulse-like form. Why then, is a demodulator needed to recover the
pulse waveform? (Chapter 3, introduction)
• Why is Eb / No a natural figure-of-merit for digital communication
systems? (Section 3.1.5)
• The term matched-filter is often used synonymously with correlation
detector. How is that possible when their mathematical operations are
different? (Section 3.2.3.1)
• Describe the two fair ways of comparing different curves that depict bit-
error probability versus Eb / No. (Section 3.2.5.3)
• At what location in the system is Eb / No defined? (Section 4.3.2)
• ASK or PSK is visualized as a constellation of signal locations (points)
on a plane. Why can’t we use a similarly simple visualization for
orthogonal signaling such as FSK? (Section 4.4.4)
• In the case of MFSK signaling, what is the minimum tone spacing that
ensures signals to be orthogonal? (Section 4.5.4)
• Digital modulation schemes fall into one of the two classes with opposite
behavior characteristics: orthogonal signaling, and phase/amplitude
signaling. Describe the behavior of each class. (Section 4.8.2)
• In the case of multiple-phase shift keying (MPSK), why does bandwidth
efficiency (bits/sec/Hz) improve with higher dimensional signaling?
(Sections 4.8.2 and 4.8.3)
• Why do BPSK and QPSK manifest the same bit-error-probability
relationship? (Section 4.8.4)
• In the case of orthogonal signaling such as MFSK, why does error
performance improve with higher dimensional signaling? (See Section
4.8.5)
• Explain the following: “The use of Gray code for assigning bits to
symbols, represents one of the few cases in digital communications
where a benefit can be achieved almost free-of-charge.” (See Section
4.9.4)