ELT-43008 DIGITAL COMMUNICATION - Class Exercise 2, Spring 2020

1. Find a mathematical proof that the theoretically optimum (from a bandwidth point of view)
sinc pulse is infinitely sensitive to timing errors, by considering a baseband PAM signal using
such pulses:

sin(𝜋𝑡⁄𝑇 )
𝑥(𝑡) = ∑∞
𝑚=−∞ 𝐴𝑚 𝑝(𝑡 − 𝑚𝑇) with 𝑝(𝑡) = 𝑠𝑖𝑛𝑐(𝑡⁄𝑇) = (𝜋𝑡⁄𝑇 )

Hint: show that when this signal is sampled at wrong time instants t = kT + ε, then the
resulting sampled sequence has an aggregate error which in the worst case diverges to infinity,
for any arbitrarily small value of the timing error ε .

2. Consider the following two I/Q demodulation receiver structures, which differ in the order
between front-end filtering and down-conversion. Show that the two receivers are equivalent.

3. Suppose that a given bit rate Rb is required for a digital communication system which uses
raised-cosine pulses with roll-off α to transmit symbols over an AWGN channel. Assume the
receiver uses ideal lowpass filters.

a) Consider the "rough" approximations for symbol error probabilities from the lecture notes
(page 161), and show that, when doing a comparison based on equal average symbol power,
2-PAM and 4-PSK modulations have the same symbol error rate performance, while 16-QAM
is about 4 dB worse.

b) Assume instead a comparison based on equal maximum instantaneous symbol power, and
show that in this case the performance difference between 2-PAM/4-PSK and 16-QAM is
about 6.5 dB.

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