CHAPTER 2

Formatting and Baseband Modulation

Formatting
Difference Between Baseband
and Bandpass Transmission

■ Baseband: When you transmit without a sinusoidal

■ Bandpass: When you need a sinusoidal as a carrier for
transmission
Formatting and Baseband
What is Formatting?
▪ Information can take either of the three forms:
1. Textual information
2. Analog signals
3. Digital data
▪ Before the signals are transmitted over a digital
communication channel, an information bearing signal
must be converted to digital symbols (Formatting).
▪ The resulting digital symbols are then represented by
baseband waveforms (Pulse Modulation or Line Coding).
Block Diagram
Block diagram representing formatting and transmission of baseband signals.
 Textual Data (1)
Seven-bit American Standard Code for Information Interchange (ASCII) for encoding alphanumerics
Textual Data (2)
Extended Binary Coded Decimal Interchange Information (EBCDIC) for encoding alphanumerics
Message and Symbol

◼ Textual message comprises a sequence of alphanumeric

characters.
◼ Example: Hello, how are you.
◼ Textual message is converted into a sequence of bits, i.e. bit
stream or baseband signal.
◼ Symbols are formed by a group of k bits from a finite symbol set
of M=2k such symbols.
◼ A system using a symbol set size of M is referred to as an M-ary
system.
Message and Symbol:
Example
Formatting Analog Information
 Periodic Sampling
◼ Typically, discrete-time signals are formed by periodically
sampling a continuous-time signal : x(n)=xa(nTs)
The sampling interval Ts is the sampling period, and
fs=1/Ts is the sampling frequency in samples per second.
◼ The sampling process:

xa(t) fs=1/Ts xs(t) Convert impulses

x(n)
into samples

Sa(t)
 Sampling Theorem :
◼ A bandlimited continuous-time signal, with highest frequency(bandwidth) B
Hz, can be uniquely recovered from its samples provided that the sampling
rate Fs  2B samples per second.
◼ The frequency Fs = 2B is called the Nyquist sampling frequency.
◼ If the signal is sampled at less than the Nyquist rate, then the aliasing
occurs.
 xa (t )

0 Ts 2Ts 3Ts 4Ts 5Ts 6Ts 7Ts 8Ts 9Ts 10Ts 11Ts

sa (t ) =   (t − nTs )
n=−

0 Ts 2Ts 3Ts 4Ts 5Ts 6Ts 7Ts 8Ts 9Ts 10Ts 11Ts
 
xs (t ) = xa (t ) sa (t ) =  xa (t ) (t − nTs ) =  xa (nTs ) (t − nTs )
n=− n=−

0 Ts 2Ts 3Ts 4Ts 5Ts 6Ts 7Ts 8Ts 9Ts 10Ts 11Ts
Illustration of Ideal Sampling
 ◼ The Fourier transform of the continuous-time sampled signal X s ( f ) is a
periodic function consisting of a superposition of shifted replicas of
X a ( f ), scaled by 1/Ts .
For f ss 
For   fB B
 22 Xa( f )

− fB 0 fB
s)( )
X s (X
n=-2 n=-2n=-1 n=-1 1/T
1/Tss n=0
n=0 n=1 n=1n=2 n=2



− s − fs 00 fs s
s − B

The overlap of the Fourier transform of each of the

terms of the sampled signal is called aliasing
Example
Telephone companies digitize voice by assuming a
maximum frequency of 4000 Hz. The sampling rate
therefore is 8000 samples per second.
Natural Sampling
◼ Replace impulse train in ideal sampling with a pulse train p(t)
(also know as the gating waveform).
◼ The pulse train

where

◼ The pulse train can be implemented by an on/off switch.

Illustration of Natural Sampling
Fourier Transform of a
Periodic Signal
 Sample and Hold
◼ Sample and hold is the most popular sampling method.
◼ Involves two operations:
◼ Sample and hold
Analog-to-Digital Conversion

◼ Components : anti-aliasing filter, sample and hold, analog-to-digital

converter (quantization).

Anti- Sample Analog

Aliasing and to
Filter Hold Digital

Block Diagram of an ADC

Anti-aliasing Filter
■ The role of anti-aliasing filter is to cut off the frequency
components that is higher than the half of sampling
frequency.
■ Ideally, the anti-aliasing filter should have a lowpass
frequency response,
 1, - fT / 2  f  fT / 2
Ha ( f ) = 
0, f  - fT / 2, f  fT / 2

Such a “brickwall” filter can’t be realized using practical

analog circuit, hence, must be approximated.
Frequency Response of 4 Types of Filter
 Why Oversampling
Without Oversampling
■ High performance analog low pass filter
■ Sampling at Nyquist rate
■ Analog to Digital Convertor

With Oversampling
■ Low performance analog low pass filter
■ Sampling at higher rate
■ Analog to digital convertor
■ High performance digital filter
■ Downsampling
Quantization
A/D Conversion
◼ Uniform quantizer
◼ Peak signal power
to average
quantization noise
power is:

S
   3L
2
 N q
◼ SNR increases as
a function of the
number of
quantization level
squared.
Effects of Quantization

■ Quantization noise
■ Quantization saturation
■ Timing jitter during sampling
 Uniform Quantization (2)
— Using a uniform quantizer for speech signals provides coarse
quantization at low amplitudes
 Uniform Quantization (1)
▪ For most voice
communications, very
low speech volumes
predominate.
▪ Large amplitudes are
very rare while low
amplitudes are more
often
Nonuniform Quantization (1)
▪ Nonuniform quantizers are used for speech signals, which
provide coarse quantization at high amplitudes and fine
quantization at low amplitudes.
▪ Nonuniform quantization is achieved by the process of
compression followed by uniform quantization.

▪ Respective expansion happens at the receiver

Nonuniform Quantization (2)
▪ Two commonly used companders are:
μ − law compander A − law compander
 A(| x | / xmax ) | x| 1
y sgn( x ) 0  
log e 1 + (| x | / xmax )  max
1 + log e A xmax A
y = ymax sgn( x) y = 
log e 1 +  1 + log e A(| x | / xmax ) 1 | x|
 ymax sgn( x)  1
 1 + log e A A xmax
Examples of Sampling

Original analog waveform Natural-sampled data

Quantized samples Sample and Hold Quantized

 PCM
◼ A PCM signal is obtained from the quantized PAM
signal by encoding each quantized sample to a digital
codeword
◼ In binary PCM each quantized sample is digitally
encoded into an R-bit binary codeword.
◼ Binary digits of a PCM signal can be transmitted using
many efficient modulation schemes.
PCM - Example
Baseband Transmission
PCM Waveform Example

PCM sequence

Pulse representation

Pules waveform
PCM Waveform Types

◼ Nonreturn-to-zero (NRZ)
◼ NRZ is most commonly used PCM waveform
◼ NRZ-L (L for level)
◼ NRZ-M (M for mark)
◼ NRZ-S (S for space)
◼ Return-to-zero (RZ)
◼ Unipolar-RZ, bipolar-RZ, RZ-AMI(alternate mark inversion)
◼ Phase encoded
◼ Multilevel binary
PCM Coding (1)

1 = 1 voltage level,
0=another voltage level

1 (mark)=change in level,
0 (space) = no change in level

A complement of NRZ-M

1=half-bit-wide pulse,
0=no pulse

1 and 0 by opposite-level pulses

1=equal amplitude alternating pulse

0=no pulse
PCM Coding (2)
Which waveform to use
 M-ary Pulse-Modulation
◼ Multilevel signaling - a group of k-bit is transmitted by M=2k level
pulse.
M-ary Baseband Modulation
Noise in communication systems
• Thermal noise is described by a zero-mean white Gaussian random
process, n(t).
• Its PSD is flat, hence, it is called white noise.

Power spectral density

Autocorrelation function

Probability density function

Signal transmission through linear systems

Input Output
Linear system
–Deterministic signals:
–Random signals:
Signal transmission … - cont’d
• Ideal filters:

Non-causal!
Low-pass

Band-pass High-pass

• Realizable filters:
RC filters Butterworth filter
 Bandwidth of signal
• Baseband versus bandpass:

Baseband Bandpass
signal signal
Local oscillator

• Bandwidth dilemma:
• Bandlimited signals are not realizable!
• Realizable signals have infinite bandwidth!
Bits per PCM Word
◼ PCM word size
◼ How many bits shall we assign to each analog sample?
e  pV pp
q V pp
emax = =
2 2L
V pp e: quantization error,
 pV pp Vpp peak-to-peak voltage
2L q: quantization level
1
→L
2p
1
→2 
l

2p
 1 
l  log 2  
 2p 
 Bandwidth of signal …
• Different definition of bandwidth:
a) Half-power bandwidth d) Fractional power containment bandwidth
b) Noise equivalent bandwidth e) Bounded power spectral density
c) Null-to-null bandwidth f) Absolute bandwidth

(a)
(b)
(c)
(d)

(e)50dB
Spectral Efficiency

■ We can say that the Null-to-Null bandwidth is equal to 2/T. Where, T is

the width of the pulse.
■ In case of binary pulse we can only Transmit 1 bit per symbol (pulse).
In case of M-ary we can transmit log2(M).
■ Spectral efficiency is the number of bits transmitted per bandwidth
used. Thus, in case of binary pulses it is 1/(2/T). In case of M-ary it is
log2(M) /(2/T). We consider here NtoN Bandwidth
■ Binary pulses have less spectral efficiency as compared to M-ary.
However, the transmission of more bits per pulse will increase the
error probability. More bits per pulse means more erroneus bits.