Offset-QAM based coherent WDM for spectral efficiency enhancement

Optically multiplexed multi-carrier systems with channel spacing reduced to the symbol rate per carrier are highly susceptible to inter-channel crosstalk, which places stringent requirements for the specifications of system components and hinders the use of high-level formats. In this paper, we investigate the performance benefits of using offset 4-, 16-, and 64-quadrature amplitude modulation (QAM) in coherent wavelength division multiplexing (CoWDM). We compare this system with recently reported Nyquist WDM and no-guard-interval optical coherent orthogonal frequency division multiplexing, and show that the presented system greatly relaxes the requirements for device specifications and enhances the spectral efficiency by enabling the use of high-level QAM. The achieved performance can approach the theoretical limits using practical components

Advanced Modulation and Coding Technology Conference

The objectives, approach, and status of all current LeRC-sponsored industry contracts and university grants are presented. The following topics are covered: (1) the LeRC Space Communications Program, and Advanced Modulation and Coding Projects; (2) the status of four contracts for development of proof-of-concept modems; (3) modulation and coding work done under three university grants, two small business innovation research contracts, and two demonstration model hardware development contracts; and (4) technology needs and opportunities for future missions

Digital implementation of an upstream DOCSIS QAM modulator and channel emulator

The concept of cable television, originally called community antenna television (CATV), began in the 1940's. The information and services provided by cable operators have changed drastically since the early days. Cable service providers are no longer simply providing their customers with broadcast television but are providing a multi-purpose, two-way link to the digital world. Custom programming, telephone service, radio, and high-speed internet access are just a few of the services offered by cable service providers in the 21st century. At the dawn of the internet the dominant mode of access was through telephone lines. Despite advances in dial-up modem technology, the telephone system was unable to keep pace with the demand for data throughput. In the late 1990's an industry consortium known as Cable Television Laboratories, Inc. developed a standard protocol for providing high-speed internet access through the existing CATV infrastructure. This protocol is known as Data Over Cable Service Interface Specification (DOCSIS) and it helped to usher in the era of the information superhighway. CATV systems use different parts of the radio frequency (RF) spectrum for communication to and from the user. The downstream portion (data destined for the user) consumes the bulk of the spectrum and is located at relatively high frequencies. The upstream portion (data destined to the network from the user) of the spectrum is smaller and located at the low end of the spectrum. This lower frequency region of the RF spectrum is particularly prone to impairments such as micro-reflections, which can be viewed as a type of multipath interference. Upstream data transfer in the presence of these impairments is therefore problematic and requires complex signal correction algorithms to be employed in the receiver. The quality of a receiver is largely determined by how well it mitigates the signal impairments introduced by the channel. For this reason, engineers developing a receiver require a piece of equipment that can emulate the channel impairments in any permutation in order to test their receiver. The conventional test methodology uses a hardware RF channel emulator connected between the transmitter and the receiver under test. This method not only requires an expensive RF channel emulator, but a functioning analog front-end as well. Of these two problems, the expense of the hardware emulator is likely less important than the delay in development caused by waiting for a functional analog front-end. Receiver design is an iterative, time consuming process that requires the receiver's digital signal processing (DSP) algorithms be tested as early as possible to reduce the time-to-market. This thesis presents a digital implementation of a DOCSIS-compliant channel emulator whereby cable micro-reflections and thermal noise at the analog front-end of the receiver are modelled digitally at baseband. The channel emulator and the modulator are integrated into a single hardware structure to produce a compact circuit that, during receiver testing, resides inside the same field programmable gate array (FPGA) as the receiver. This approach removes the dependence on the analog front-end allowing it to be developed concurrently with the receiver's DSP circuits, thus reducing the time-to-market. The approach taken in this thesis produces a fully programmable channel emulator that can be loaded onto FPGAs as needed by engineers working independently on different receiver designs. The channel emulator uses 3 independent data streams to produce a 3-channel signal, whereby a main channel with micro-reflections is flanked on either side by adjacent channels. Thermal noise normally generated by the receiver's analog front-end is emulated and injected into the signal. The resulting structure utilizes 43 dedicated multipliers and 401.125 KB of RAM, and achieves a modulation error ratio (MER) of 55.29 dB

An investigation into the use of orthogonal frequency division multiplexing in packet radio

Bibliography: leaves 56-58.The concept of Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing has been around since the 1960s. It has resurfaced over the last decade as being the modulation scheme of choice in some newer technologies like Digital Video Broadcasting (DVB) and Asynchronous Digital Subscriber lines (ADSL). Amateur packet radio started in 1978 and has attracted thousands of enthusiasts from around the world. The interest in packet radio has waned over the years due advances in the data transmission capabilities oflandline systems and also more widespread access to the Internet. The purpose of this thesis was to develop a simple software simulation model to determine whether or not OFDM could be used to increase the data rates currently available in packet radio systems. The thesis starts out with an introduction to packet radio and OFDM in Chapter 1. A slightly more detailed discussion on OFDM is given in Chapter 2 in order to develop a basic specification for the proposed OFDM model. Chapters 2,3 and 4 discuss the development of the Transmitter model, the Receiver model and the Channel model respectively using the Simulink software package. Chapter 6 discusses the problem of Peak-to-Average Power Ratios (PAPR) in OFDM and explores the use of A-law companding to reduce this problem. In Chapter 7, the developed models are simulated and their performance compared to theoretical expectations. The full system is also simulated in this chapter in order to ascertain the possible data rate through the modelled packet radio channel. Conclusions regarding the application of OFDM to packet radio are presented in Chapter 8

A low-power quadrature digital modulator in 0.18um CMOS

Quadrature digital modulation techniques are widely used in modern communication systems because of their high performance and flexibility. However, these advantages come at the cost of high power consumption. As a result, power consumption has to be taken into account as a main design factor of the modulator.In this thesis, a low-power quadrature digital modulator in 0.18um CMOS is presented with the target system clock speed of 150 MHz. The quadrature digital modulator consists of several key blocks: quadrature direct digital synthesizer (QDDS), pulse shaping filter, interpolation filter and inverse sinc filter. The design strategy is to investigate different implementations for each block and compare the power consumption of these implementations. Based on the comparison results, the implementation that consumes the lowest power will be chosen for each block. First of all, a novel low-power QDDS is proposed in the thesis. Power consumption estimation shows that it can save up to 60% of the power consumption at 150 MHz system clock frequency compared with one conventional design. Power consumption estimation results also show that using two pulse shaping blocks to process I/Q data, cascaded integrator comb (CIC) interpolation structure, and inverse sinc filter with modified canonic signed digit (MCSD) multiplication consume less power than alternative design choices. These low-power blocks are integrated together to achieve a low-power modulator. The power consumption estimation after layout shows that it only consumes about 95 mW at 150 MHz system clock rate, which is much lower than similar commercial products. The designed modulator can provide a low-power solution for various quadrature modulators. It also has an output bandwidth from 0 to 75 MHz, configurable pulse shaping filters and interpolation filters, and an internal sin(x)/x correction filter

An Investigation into the Implementation and Performance of Spectrally Shaped Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplex

Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplex (OFDM) is a flexible, robust multi-carrier modulation scheme. The orthogonal spectral shaping and spacing of OFDM sub-carriers ensure that their spectra can be over-lapped without leading to undesirable inter-carrier interference. Conventional OFDM systems have non-band limited Sinc(x) shaped subcarrier spectra. An alternative form of OFDM, referred to hereafter as Spectrally Shaped OFDM, employs band limited Nyquist shaped sub-carrier spectra. The research described in this thesis investigates the strengths and weaknesses of Spectrally Shaped OFDM as a potential modulation scheme for future mobile radio applications. From this research a novel Digital Signal Processing architecture for modulating and demodulating Spectrally Shaped OFDM sub-carriers has been derived which exploits the combination of a complex Discrete Fourier Transform (DFT) and PolyPhase Network (PPN) filter. This architecture is shown to significantly reduce the minimum number of computations required per symbol compared to previous designs. Using a custom coded computer simulation, the effects of varying the key parameters of the novel architecture's PolyPhase Filter (PPN) filter an the overall system complexity, spectral performance and system signal-to-distortion have been extensively studied. From these studies it is shown that compared to similar conventional OFDM systems, Spectrally Shaped OFDM systems possess superior out-of-band spectral qualities but significantly worse Peak-to-Average-Power-Ratio (PAPR) envelope performance. lt is also shown that the absolute value of the end PPN filter coefficients (dependent on the roll-off factor of the sub-carrier spectral shaping) dictate the system signal-to-distortion ratio when no time-domain windowing of the PPN filter coefficients is applied. Finally the effects of a both time and frequency selective fast fading channels on the modulation scheme's uncoded Bit Error Rate (BER) versus Signal-to-Noise (SNR) performance are simulated. The results obtained indicate that Spectrally Shaped OFDM is more robust (lower BER) to frequency-selective fading than time-selective fading

Orthogonal transmultiplexers : extensions to digital subscriber line (DSL) communications

An orthogonal transmultiplexer which unifies multirate filter bank theory and communications theory is investigated in this dissertation. Various extensions of the orthogonal transmultiplexer techniques have been made for digital subscriber line communication applications. It is shown that the theoretical performance bounds of single carrier modulation based transceivers and multicarrier modulation based transceivers are the same under the same operational conditions. Single carrier based transceiver systems such as Quadrature Amplitude Modulation (QAM) and Carrierless Amplitude and Phase (CAP) modulation scheme, multicarrier based transceiver systems such as Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM) or Discrete Multi Tone (DMT) and Discrete Subband (Wavelet) Multicarrier based transceiver (DSBMT) techniques are considered in this investigation. The performance of DMT and DSBMT based transceiver systems for a narrow band interference and their robustness are also investigated. It is shown that the performance of a DMT based transceiver system is quite sensitive to the location and strength of a single tone (narrow band) interference. The performance sensitivity is highlighted in this work. It is shown that an adaptive interference exciser can alleviate the sensitivity problem of a DMT based system. The improved spectral properties of DSBMT technique reduces the performance sensitivity for variations of a narrow band interference. It is shown that DSBMT technique outperforms DMT and has a more robust performance than the latter. The superior performance robustness is shown in this work. Optimal orthogonal basis design using cosine modulated multirate filter bank is discussed. An adaptive linear combiner at the output of analysis filter bank is implemented to eliminate the intersymbol and interchannel interferences. It is shown that DSBMT is the most suitable technique for a narrow band interference environment. A blind channel identification and optimal MMSE based equalizer employing a nonmaximally decimated filter bank precoder / postequalizer structure is proposed. The performance of blind channel identification scheme is shown not to be sensitive to the characteristics of unknown channel. The performance of the proposed optimal MMSE based equalizer is shown to be superior to the zero-forcing equalizer

DSP compensation for distortion in RF filters

There is a growing demand for the high quality TV programs such as High Definition TV (HDTV). The CATV network is often a suitable solution to address this demand using a CATV modem delivering high data rate digital signals in a cost effective manner, thereby, utilizing a complex digital modulation scheme is inevitable. Exploiting complex modulation schemes, entails a more sophisticated modulator and distribution system with much tighter tolerances. However, there are always distortions introduced to the modulated signal in the modulator degrading signal quality. In this research, the effect of distortions introduced by the RF band pass filter in the modulator will be considered which cause degradations on the quality of the output Quadrature Amplitude Modulated (QAM) signal. Since the RF filter's amplitude/group delay distortions are not symmetrical in the frequency domain, once translated into the base band they have a complex effect on the QAM signal. Using Matlab, the degradation effects of these distortions on the QAM signal such as Bit Error Rate (BER) is investigated. In order to compensate for the effects of the RF filter distortions, two different methods are proposed. In the first method, a complex base band compensation filter is placed after the pulse shaping filter (SRRC). The coefficients of this complex filter are determined using an optimization algorithm developed during this research. The second approach, uses a pre-equalizer in the form of a Feed Forward FIR structure placed before the pulse shaping filter (SRRC). The coefficients of this pre-equalizer are determined using the equalization algorithm employed in a test receiver, with its tap weights generating the inverse response of the RF filter. The compensation of RF filter distortions in base band, in turn, improves the QAM signal parameters such as Modulation Error Ratio (MER). Finally, the MER of the modulated QAM signal before and after the base band compensation is compared between the two methods, showing a significant enhancement in the RF modulator performance