ENGN4536/ENGN6536

Assignment 2
Released on 18 August 2017
Due date: 4pm, 1 September 2017

Brief Requirement for Submission:

Submit an electronic copy of your solution as a single PDF file in Wattle.

Use the assignment coversheet provided in Wattle as the front page.
Provide sufficient and professional descriptions for mathematical derivations.
Add references when necessary.
Show a good command of language and avoid grammar mistakes and other errors
that can be easily overlooked.
A typed version of solution is preferred. If not available, a hand-written version
is also acceptable, but everything needs to be written in a clear and easy-to-read
manner.
Strictly no late submission is accepted.
Serious penalties apply to plagiarism.

Assessment Criterion:

The assignment will be marked out of 50. Your mark will be then converted into
a scale of 100 and posted in Wattle.
Your mark (in the scale of 100) worths 4% of the final mark if you are an under-
graduate student, and 3% of the final mark if you are a postgraduate student.

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 Question 1 (10 marks):
Consider the wireless transmission from a base station to a mobile terminal over a
multipath fading channel with rich scattering. The carrier frequency is at 1 GHz and
the symbol duration is 1 micro-second. The mobile terminal is moving at a speed of 60
km/h. The RMS delay spread of the multipath fading is 1 micro-second.

Please answer the following questions:

1. What is the coherence bandwidth of the channel that ensures more than 0.9 cor-
relation in the channel frequency response?
2. Do you expect severe inter-symbol interference to occur at the mobile terminal?
Why?
3. Does the wireless transmission experience slow fading, medium-rate fading, or
fast fading? Why?
4. The Rayleigh fading channel means that the effect of the fading channel on the
SNR of the receive signal follows a Rayleigh distribution. True or False? Explain
the reason.

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 Question 2 (13 marks):
Consider a multipath fading channel with the power delay profile (in Watts) given
by
( )
Ac ( ) =7 104 ( ) + 103 106
( ) ( )
+ 2 104 2 106 + 104 3 106 . (1)

Please answer the following questions:

1. Plot the power delay profile in dBm and in delay units of micro seconds.
2. What is the average delay spread in units of micro seconds?
3. What is the RMS delay spread in units of micro seconds?
4. A receiver can only work without an equaliser when the ratio Ts / > 10, where
Ts is the symbol period. Find out the minimum symbol period without the need
for equalisation.

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 Question 3 (12 marks):
In this question, we want to compare the outage performance of two multi-level
modulation schemes over Rayleigh fading channel, namely, 8-PSK and 8-QAM. You
may use the table on Slide 19 (or Slide 30) of lecture note 8. Note that in this table, the
term s is the SNR per symbol averaged over all possible symbols in the constellation,
e.g., for M -QAM schemes, since the symbols have different energy. However, this
s does not take into account the fading process of the channel. When a system with
M -QAM is operating in the Rayleigh fading channel, the SNR per symbol (averaged
over all possible symbols in the constellation) has an exponential distribution due to
the effect of the fading channel.

Please answer the following questions:

1. Find out the average SNR per symbol (averaged over the fading process) such
that for 98% of time the symbol error probability of 8-PSK modulation is less
than 103 . Please show your result in decibel and with two digits after decimal.
2. With the average SNR per symbol (averaged over the fading process) found in
Question 3.1, find out the outage probability for the 8-QAM for the same symbol
error probability of 103 (i.e., the percentage of time the symbol error probability
of 8-QAM is higher than 103 ). Please show your result in percentage and with
two digits after decimal.
3. Which modulation has the better outage performance? Why?
4. Apart from Rayleigh fading, the other two widely used fading models for wire-
less channels are 1) Rician fading and 2) Nakagami-m fading. What are the
advantages of these two fading models relative to Rayleigh fading?
Please feel free to use the closest entry applicable in the Q function table below.

Figure 1: Table of Q Function.

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 Question 4 (10 marks):
Consider receiver diversity in Rayleigh fading channels. Please answer the follow-
ing questions:

1. A mobile communications company has a 10-branch selection combining (SC)

receiver in its premises. You are asked to design a maximum ratio combining
(MRC) diversity receiver that gives the same average postprocessing SNR per-
formance as the existing SC receiver. Assume that all branches have the same
average pre-processing SNR in both diversity schemes. How many diversity
branches will there be in your design?
2. Compute the outage probability in the absence of any diversity (i.e., only one
receiver antenna) and with the following parameters: Minimum required SNR
0 = 5 dB for acceptable performance and average received SNR = 20 dB.
3. As a system designer, you are asked to improve the outage probability perfor-
mance for the system described in Question 4.2 to be at most 0.001 by employing
multiple receiver antennas. You can choose either the SC scheme or the MRC
scheme. What is the minimum number of antennas needed in each scheme? With
the minimum number of required antennas installed, what is the obtained outage
probability in each scheme? Assume that all branches have the same average
pre-processing SNR equal to 20 dB.

Please express the outage probabilities in powers of ten with two digits after deci-
mal. For example, if the final result is 0.0057829..., please express it as 5.78 103 .

Presentation (5 marks):
Requirement for Presentation
The assignment coversheet is used as the front page.
The language used in descriptions and explanations is correct and professional.
The mathematical derivation is convincing.
The IEEE format is correctly and consistently used for references.