A study of multilevel partial response signalling for transmission in a basic supergroup bandwidth

Includes bibliographical references.The work in this thesis is primarily directed toward the design, construction and testing of an experimental multilevel partial response signalling baseband system. The system will find practical application in existing frequency division multiplexed-frequency modulated microwave links. The basic supergroup bandwidth of these links is 240 kHz. The design requires a transmission rate of 1.024 Mb/s in this bandwidth. Class-4 15 partial response signalling is the coding technique suitable to achieve this. A pilot tone scheme is used to facilitate symbol timing recovery at the demodulator. A sixth order Butterworth low pass filter approximates the ideal raised-cosine Nyquist channel. A theoretical discussion on impairments caused by deviation from this channel is given. Since the experimental system was non-ideal, it produced a degradation in the channel signal to noise ratio. This degradation, coupled with other factors, showed that further development was necessary for the system to be suitable for connection into an existing microwave link

EQUALISATION TECHNIQUES FOR MULTI-LEVEL DIGITAL MAGNETIC RECORDING

A large amount of research has been put into areas of signal processing, medium design, head and servo-mechanism design and coding for conventional longitudinal as well as perpendicular magnetic recording. This work presents some further investigation in the signal processing and coding aspects of longitudinal and perpendicular digital magnetic recording. The work presented in this thesis is based upon numerical analysis using various simulation methods. The environment used for implementation of simulation models is C/C + + programming. Important results based upon bit error rate calculations have been documented in this thesis. This work presents the new designed Asymmetric Decoder (AD) which is modified to take into account the jitter noise and shows that it has better performance than classical BCJR decoders with the use of Error Correction Codes (ECC). In this work, a new method of designing Generalised Partial Response (GPR) target and its equaliser has been discussed and implemented which is based on maximising the ratio of the minimum squared euclidean distance of the PR target to the noise penalty introduced by the Partial Response (PR) filter. The results show that the new designed GPR targets have consistently better performance in comparison to various GPR targets previously published. Two methods of equalisation including the industry's standard PR, and a novel Soft-Feedback- Equalisation (SFE) have been discussed which are complimentary to each other. The work on SFE, which is a novelty of this work, was derived from the problem of Inter Symbol Interference (ISI) and noise colouration in PR equalisation. This work also shows that multi-level SFE with MAP/BCJR feedback based magnetic recording with ECC has similar performance when compared to high density binary PR based magnetic recording with ECC, thus documenting the benefits of multi-level magnetic recording. It has been shown that 4-level PR based magnetic recording with ECC at half the density of binary PR based magnetic recording has similar performance and higher packing density by a factor of 2. A novel technique of combining SFE and PR equalisation to achieve best ISI cancellation in a iterative fashion has been discussed. A consistent gain of 0.5 dB and more is achieved when this technique is investigated with application of Maximum Transition Run (MTR) codes. As the length of the PR target in PR equalisation increases, the gain achieved using this novel technique consistently increases and reaches up to 1.2 dB in case of EEPR4 target for a bit error rate of 10-5

Error-correction coding for high-density magnetic recording channels.

Finally, a promising algorithm which combines RS decoding algorithm with LDPC decoding algorithm together is investigated, and a reduced-complexity modification has been proposed, which not only improves the decoding performance largely, but also guarantees a good performance in high signal-to-noise ratio (SNR), in which area an error floor is experienced by LDPC codes.The soft-decision RS decoding algorithms and their performance on magnetic recording channels have been researched, and the algorithm implementation and hardware architecture issues have been discussed. Several novel variations of KV algorithm such as soft Chase algorithm, re-encoded Chase algorithm and forward recursive algorithm have been proposed. And the performance of nested codes using RS and LDPC codes as component codes have been investigated for bursty noise magnetic recording channels.Future high density magnetic recoding channels (MRCs) are subject to more noise contamination and intersymbol interference, which make the error-correction codes (ECCs) become more important. Recent research of replacement of current Reed-Solomon (RS)-coded ECC systems with low-density parity-check (LDPC)-coded ECC systems obtains a lot of research attention due to the large decoding gain for LDPC-coded systems with random noise. In this dissertation, systems aim to maintain the RS-coded system using recent proposed soft-decision RS decoding techniques are investigated and the improved performance is presented

Investigation into synchronization for partial response signals and the development of a clock recovery scheme for 49QPRS signals

ThesisData communication is used increasingly in modern society. It is against this background that research is conducted worldwide toward the improvement of existing, as well as the development of new, improved communication techniques. Correlative encoding of data before transmission IS a very frequency-effective communication technique. The extent to which any communication technique is used, however, is dependent on a wide variety of factors. This study regarding the synchronisation of 49QPRS signals was undertaken with this in mind. Since digital signal processing (DSP) is used increasingly in modern communication systems, both a data transmitter and receiver were implemented by making use of this technique. Not only would this result in a system with all the desirable characteristics inherent to DSP, but, by making limited changes to the supporting software, the evaluation of a wide variety of alternatives became feasible. During the study a system making use of a pilot tone at one third the frequency of the carrier frequency was developed. The receiver recovers this signal by means of DSP techniques and its frequency is tripled. The phase of this recovered signal is crosscorrelated every 650 ~s in time with a locally generated signal of the correct frequency - and the phase of the locally generated signal is adjusted accordingly. It was found that the accuracy and stability of the locally generated signal were such that sufficient synchronisation was obtained in this manner. The quality of synchronisation is a function of the level of the pilot tone and if this tone should decrease to below a certain value, unacceptably large phase adjustments have to be made. This results in a senous degradation of the spectral purity of the recovered signal. However, the system as described exhibits extremely good noise immunity. During the development of the clock frequency recovery system, a baseband filter with a unique frequency response was defined. Making use of this, in conjunction with a limited amount of pre-processing, and an absolute value rectifier, recovery of the clock frequency becomes possible. In order to limit the amount of processing by the receiver, the baseband filter was implemented in its entirety in the transmitter. The recovered signal showed a moderate amount of amplitude variation, but an extremely stable synchronising signal could be derived from this. During the study both levels of synchronisation required by a hypothetical 49QPRS data communication system were therefore investigated fully and solutions found

Enhanced coding, clock recovery and detection for a magnetic credit card

Merged with duplicate record 10026.1/2299 on 03.04.2017 by CS (TIS)This thesis describes the background, investigation and construction of a system for storing data on the magnetic stripe of a standard three-inch plastic credit in: inch card. Investigation shows that the information storage limit within a 3.375 in by 0.11 in rectangle of the stripe is bounded to about 20 kBytes. Practical issues limit the data storage to around 300 Bytes with a low raw error rate: a four-fold density increase over the standard. Removal of the timing jitter (that is prob-' ably caused by the magnetic medium particle size) would increase the limit to 1500 Bytes with no other system changes. This is enough capacity for either a small digital passport photograph or a digitized signature: making it possible to remove printed versions from the surface of the card. To achieve even these modest gains has required the development of a new variable rate code that is more resilient to timing errors than other codes in its efficiency class. The tabulation of the effects of timing errors required the construction of a new code metric and self-recovering decoders. In addition, a new method of timing recovery, based on the signal 'snatches' has been invented to increase the rapidity with which a Bayesian decoder can track the changing velocity of a hand-swiped card. The timing recovery and Bayesian detector have been integrated into one computation (software) unit that is self-contained and can decode a general class of (d, k) constrained codes. Additionally, the unit has a signal truncation mechanism to alleviate some of the effects of non-linear distortion that are present when a magnetic card is read with a magneto-resistive magnetic sensor that has been driven beyond its bias magnetization. While the storage density is low and the total storage capacity is meagre in comparison with contemporary storage devices, the high density card may still have a niche role to play in society. Nevertheless, in the face of the Smart card its long term outlook is uncertain. However, several areas of coding and detection under short-duration extreme conditions have brought new decoding methods to light. The scope of these methods is not limited just to the credit card