0.1 A telecommunication system  (Page 8/15)

Even within the frequency range of the message signal, the medium can affect different frequencies in different ways. (These are called frequency selective effects .) For example, a signal may arrive at the receiver, and a momentlater a copy of the same signal might arrive after having bounced off a mountain or a nearby building.This is called multipath interference , and it can be viewed as a sum of weighted and delayed versions

of the transmitted signal. This may be familiar to the (analog broadcast) TV vieweras “ghosts,” misty copies of the original signal that are shifted and superimposed over the main image.In the simple case of a sinusoid, a delay corresponds to a phase shift,making it more difficult to reassemble the original message. A special filter called the equalizer is often added to the receiver to help improve the situation.An equalizer is a kind of “deghosting” circuit, We refrain from calling these ghost busters. and equalization is addressed in detail in [link] .

Sampling at the receiver

Because of the proliferation of inexpensive and capable digital processors, receivers often contain chipsthat are essentially special purpose computers. In such receivers, many of the functions that are traditionally handled bydiscrete components (such as analog oscillators and filters) can be handled digitally.Of course, this requires that the analog received signal be turned into digital information (a series of numbers) that acomputer can process. This analog-to-digital conversion (A/D) is known as sampling .

Sampling measures the amplitude of the waveform at regular intervals, and thenstores these measurements in memory. Two of the chief design issues in a digital receiverare the following:

• Where should the signal be sampled?
• How often should the sampling be done?

The answers to these questions are intimately related to each other.

When taking samples of a signal, they must be taken fast enough so that important information is not lost.Suppose that a signal has no frequency content above $f^{*}$ Hz. The widely known Nyquist reconstruction principle (see [link] ) says that if sampling occurs at a rate greater than $2f^{*}$ samples per second, it is possible to reconstruct the original signal fromthe samples alone. Thus, as long as the samples aretaken rapidly enough, no information is lost. On the other hand, when samples are taken too slowly,the signal cannot be reconstructed exactly from the samples, and the resulting distortion is called aliasing .

Accordingly, in the receiver, it is necessary to sample at least twice as fast as the highest frequency present in the analog signal being sampledin order to avoid aliasing. Because the receiver contains modulators that change thefrequencies of the signals, different parts of the system have different highest frequencies.Hence the answer to the question of how fast to sample is dependent on where the samples will be taken.

The sampling

1. could be done at the input to the receiver at a rate proportional to the carrier frequency,
2. could be done after the downconversion, at a rate proportional to the rate of the symbols, or
3. could be done at some intermediate rate.