Digital Communications Lab

Laboratory report submitted for the partial fulfillment

of the requirements for the degree of

Bachelor of Technology
in
Electronics and Communication Engineering

by

Muskan Bhargava - 18UEC095

Course Coordinator
Dr. Aakash Gupta

Department of Electronics and Communication Engineering

The LNM Institute of Information Technology, Jaipur

October 2020
Copyright
c The LNMIIT 2020
All Rights Reserved
 Contents

Chapter Page

1 Experiment - 7 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1
1.1 Aim . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1
1.2 Hardware used . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1
1.3 Theory . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1
1.3.1 (7, 4) Hamming Code . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2
1.3.2 Hard Decision Decoder . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2
1.3.2.1 Find codeword closest in Hamming distance . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3
1.3.3 Soft Decision Decoder . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3
1.3.3.1 Find codeword closest in Euclidean distance . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3
1.4 Results . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4
1.4.1 Code for BER vs SNR . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4
1.4.2 Codeword Table . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6
1.5 Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6

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 Chapter 1

Experiment - 7

1.1 Aim
1. To perform encoding and decoding for a (7, 4) Hamming code.

1.2 Hardware used

1. Desktop/Laptop
2. MATLAB

1.3 Theory
The Hamming code is a single error correction linear block code with (n, k) = (2m −1, 2m −1−m),
where m = n − k is the number of check bits in the codeword. The simplest non-trivial code is for
m = 3, which is the (7, 4) Hamming code.
The generator matrix of the Hamming code has dimension k × n and is of the form

G = [Ik×k S]

For this Hamming code, S has one row for each possible m− bit string with weight at least 2. There
are exactly k = 2m − m − 1 such strings. Any Hamming code is a 1-error correcting code as the two
conditions above are satisfied. The (7, 4) Hamming code is given by the generating matrix:
 
1 0 0 0 1 0 1
 
 0 1 0 0 1 1 1 
G=  0 0 1 0 1 1 0 

 
0 0 0 1 0 1 1

1
1.3.1 (7, 4) Hamming Code

1.3.2 Hard Decision Decoder

2
1.3.2.1 Find codeword closest in Hamming distance

1. Find the distance of b from 2k codeword.

2. Completely increases exponentially with k

)
u = [u1 , u2 , ..., un ]
Binary
v = [v1 , v2 , ..., vn ]

dH (u, v) = Number of places in which u and v difference.

1.3.3 Soft Decision Decoder

1.3.3.1 Find codeword closest in Euclidean distance

1. Find the distance with 2k code-symbol vectors.

2. Complexity more than hard decision decoder.

3
1.4 Results
1.4.1 Code for BER vs SNR

clc;
clear all;
close all;
%18uec065

G = [1 0 0 0 1 0 1;0 1 0 0 1 1 1;0 0 1 0 1 1 0;0 0 0 1 0 1 1];

d = dec2bin(0:15,4)-48;

C = mod(d*G,2);
EBNdb=[0,1,2,3,4,5,6,7];
BER_hardm=[];
BER_softm=[];
for EbNdb = 0:7
R = 4/7;
EbN = 10^(EbNdb/10);
sigma = sqrt(1/(2*R*EbN));

k=4;
n=7;
nerr_hard = 0; nblocks = 10000; err_hard = 0;
nerr_soft = 0; err_soft = 0;
for i=1:nblocks
msg = randi([0,1], 1,k);
cword = [msg mod(msg(1) + msg(2) + msg(3),2) mod(msg(2) +
msg(3) + msg(4),2) mod(msg(1) + msg(2) + msg(4),2)];
noise = sigma*randn(1, n);

% bpsk
tx = 2*cword-1;
rx = tx+noise;

% hard decisions

b = (rx > 0);

dist = mod(repmat(b, 16, 1)+C, 2)*ones(7,1);
[min1, pos] = min(dist);
msg_hard = C(pos, 1:4);

% soft decisions
corr = (2*C-1)*rx';
[min2,pos] = max(corr);
msg_soft = C(pos,1:4);

err_soft = sum(msg~=msg_soft);
err_hard = sum(msg~=msg_hard);
nerr_hard = nerr_hard + err_hard;
nerr_soft = nerr_soft + err_soft;
end
4
BER_hard = nerr_hard/k/nblocks;
BER_soft = nerr_soft/k/nblocks;
BER_softm = [BER_softm BER_soft];
end
semilogy(EBNdb, BER_hardm);
hold on
semilogy(EBNdb, BER_softm);
title('BER curve for (7,4) Hamming Code - (18UEC065 - Shaan Gupta)')

legend('Hard Simulated','Soft Simulated')

hold off;

Published with MATLAB® R2020a

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2
1.4.2 Codeword Table

1.5 Conclusion
In this experiment we are able to study the hamming code, hard decision and soft decision decoder
and finally after plotting the graph between BER for different value of SER (like: 1dB, 2dB, 3dB, 4dB),
we conclude that Soft Decision Decoder performs better than the Hard Decision Decoder because it
does not have the threshold step involved in it as in the Hard Decision Decoder.