Carrier Arraying with Coupled Phase-Locked Loops for Tracking Improvement

This paper considers a system that couples several phaselocked loops (PLL's) to improve carrier tracking performance. The system coherently combines the received carrier signals at geographically separated ground antennas to increase the total effective aperture. It automatically aligns the received carrier's phases to enhance received carrier signal-to-noise ratio. The tracking performance of this system is being assessed in terms of rms phase jitter.     

Trellis Coded Modulation for 4800-9600 bits/s Transmission Over a Fading Mobile Satellite Channel

The combination of trellis coding and MPSK signaling with the addition of asymmetry to the signal set is discussed with regard to its suitabllity as a modulation/coding scheme for the fading mobile satellite channel. For MPSK, introducing nonuniformity (asymmetry) into the spacing between signal points in the constellation buys a further improvement in performance over that achievable with trellis coded symmetric MPSK, all this without increasing the average or peak power, or changing the bandwidth constraints imposed on the system. Whereas previous contributions have considered the performance of trellis coded modulation transmitted over an additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN) channel, the emphasis in this paper is on the performance of trellis coded MPSK in the fading environment. The results will be obtained by using a combination of analysis and simulation. It will be assumed that the effect of the fading on the phase of the received signal is fully compensated for either by tracking it with some form of phase-locked loop or with pilot tone calibration techniques. Thus, our results will only reflect the degradation due to the effect of the fading on the amplitude of the received signal. Also, we shall consider only the case where interleaving/deinterleaving is employed to further combat the fading. This allows for considerable simplification of the analysis and is of great practical interest. Finally, the impact of the availability of channel state information on average bit error probability performance is assessed.     

Tight exponential upper bounds on the ML decoding error probability of block codes over fully interleaved fading channels

We derive tight exponential upper bounds on the decoding error probability of block codes which are operating over fully interleaved Rician fading channels, coherently detected and maximum-likelihood decoded. It is assumed that the fading samples are statistically independent and that perfect estimates of these samples are provided to the decoder. These upper bounds on the bit and block error probabilities are based on certain variations of the Gallager bounds. These bounds do not require integration in their final version and they are reasonably tight in a certain portion of the rate region exceeding the cutoff rate of the channel. By inserting interconnections between these bounds, we show that they are generalized versions of some reported bounds for the binary-input additive white Gaussian noise channel.     

A soft-input soft-output APP module for iterative decoding ofconcatenated codes

Concatenated coding schemes consist of the combination of two or more simple constituent encoders and interleavers. The parallel concatenation known as “turbo code” has been shown to yield remarkable coding gains close to theoretical limits, yet admitting a relatively simple iterative decoding technique. The recently proposed serial concatenation of interleaved codes may offer superior performance to that of turbo codes. In both coding schemes, the core of the iterative decoding structure is a soft-input soft-output (SISO) a posteriori probability (APP) module. In this letter, we describe the SISO APP module that updates the APP's corresponding to the input and the output bits, of a code, and show how to embed it into an iterative decoder for a new hybrid concatenation of three codes, to fully exploit the benefits of the proposed SISO APP module     

On the implementation and performance of single and doubledifferential detection schemes

A variety of schemes for performing differential detection in environments characterized by frequency offset are discussed. All of the schemes involve encoding the input phase information as a second-order difference and performing an analogous second-order differential detection at the receiver. Because of the back-to-back differential detection operations at the receiver, The performance of most of the schemes is considerably degraded relative to that of first-order differential detection schemes. However, the latter are quite sensitive to frequency offset and, in many instances, cannot be used at all. It is demonstrated that via a simple enhancement of using a 2 T s (instead of T s) delay in the second stage of the encoder and first stage of the decoder, the performance degradation can be significantly reduced. This result is significant in view of the fact that it comes without any penalty in implementation complexity     

The design of trellis coded MPSK for fading channels: setpartitioning for optimum code design

A previous work on criteria for designing trellis-coded MPSK modulation to achieve minimum error probability performance on the Rician fading channel (see ibid., vol.36, no.9, p.1004-1012, Sep. 1988) is extended. It is demonstrated that allowing for multiple symbols per trellis branch, i.e., multiple trellis-coded modulation (MTCM), provides an additional degree of freedom for designing a code to meet the optimization on the fading channel. Diversities larger than those achievable with conventional trellis codes having the same number of trellis states are now attainable, it is under these conditions that MTCM achieves its full potential     

Multiple trellis coded modulation (MTCM)

The authors demonstrate a trellis coded modulation technique referred to as multiple trellis coded modulation (MTCM) wherein more than one channel symbol per trellis branch is transmitted. They have found simple two-state trellis codes for symmetric MPSK multiple phase-shift keying and AM modulations that can achieve 3-dB gain over uncoded modulation at very high signal-to-noise ratios without bandwidth expansion or reduction in information bit rate. The gain of these codes with respect to previously reported two-state trellis codes is between 1 and 2 dB at very high signal-to-noise ratios, depending on the number of bits per Hertz transmitted. These gains are achieved for those of the equivalent conventional trellis codes with the same number of states in the trellis diagram. The authors note that additional computations per branch are needed for the multiple trellis coding scheme. The concept can be extended to a higher number of states and other types of modulations     

Calorimetric and spectroscopic investigations of β-lactoglobulin upon interaction with copper ion

The effect of copper(II) ions (Cu(+2)) on the structure of β-lactoglobulin (β-lg) was investigated spectroscopically using UV-visible, fluorescence and circular dichroism (CD) and calorimetrically using isothermal titration calorimetry (ITC), at different temperatures. Results of the UV-visible studies showed that adding Cu(+2) to β-lg solution caused increasing turbidity, indicative of protein aggregation. It was noticeable that the rate of increasing turbidity was directly proportional to increasing temperature. The far-UV CD studies displayed that the Cu(+2) cannot induce any significant changes in the secondary structures of β-lg at different temperatures. Also, the ITC data indicated that the binding process of Cu(+2) to β-lg is mainly entropically driven. The results highlight that copper ions cause the tertiary structure of β-lg to change and induce a slightly open structure leading to the formation of supramolecular aggregates in β-lg which may result in the reduced allergenicity of β-lg and its increased use in industrial applications.     

Iterative turbo decoder analysis based on density evolution

We track the density of extrinsic information in iterative turbo decoders by actual density evolution, and also approximate it by symmetric Gaussian density functions. The approximate model is verified by experimental measurements. We view the evolution of these density functions through an iterative decoder as a nonlinear dynamical system with feedback. Iterative decoding of turbo codes and of serially concatenated codes is analyzed by examining whether a signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) for the extrinsic information keeps growing with iterations. We define a “noise figure” for the iterative decoder, such that the turbo decoder will converge to the correct codeword if the noise figure is bounded by a number below zero dB. By decomposing the code's noise figure into individual curves of output SNR versus input SNR corresponding to the individual constituent codes, we gain many new insights into the performance of the iterative decoder for different constituents. Many mysteries of turbo codes are explained based on this analysis. For example, we show why certain codes converge better with iterative decoding than more powerful codes which are only suitable for maximum likelihood decoding. The roles of systematic bits and of recursive convolutional codes as constituents of turbo codes are crystallized. The analysis is generalized to serial concatenations of mixtures of complementary outer and inner constituent codes. Design examples are given to optimize mixture codes to achieve low iterative decoding thresholds on the signal-to-noise ratio of the channel