All posts by Yasir Ahmed (aka John)

About Yasir Ahmed (aka John)

More than 20 years of experience in various organizations in Pakistan, the USA, and Europe. Worked as a Research Assistant within the Mobile and Portable Radio Group (MPRG) of Virginia Tech and was one of the first researchers to propose Space Time Block Codes for eight transmit antennas. The collaboration with MPRG continued even after graduating with an MSEE degree and has resulted in 12 research publications and a book on Wireless Communications. Worked for Qualcomm USA as an Engineer with the key role of performance and conformance testing of UMTS modems. Qualcomm is the inventor of CDMA technology and owns patents critical to the 4G and 5G standards.

Demystifying the Fourier Transform

The Fourier Transform is often used in Communication and Signal Processing to find the spectral content of a time-domain signal. The most common example is that of a sinusoid in the time domain, resulting in a sharply peaked signal in the frequency domain, also known as a delta function. A rectangular pulse in the time domain has a more complicated frequency domain equivalent, a sinc function. A rectangular pulse may be thought of as a combination of many sinusoids, hence its frequency domain equivalent is not that straightforward.

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Why is MIMO Fading Capacity Higher than AWGN Capacity

In a previous post we have seen that MIMO fading capacity is much higher than AWGN capacity with multiple antennas. How is this possible? How can randomness added by a fading channel help us? In this post we try to find the reason for this. Let’s assume the following signal model for a Multi Input Multi Output antenna system.

x=Hs+w

Here s is the NT by 1 signal vector, w is the NR by 1 noise vector and H is the NR by NT channel matrix. The received signal vector is represented by x which has dimensions of NR by 1. In expanded form this can be written as (assuming NT =4 and NR =4):

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MIMO, SIMO and MISO Capacity in AWGN and Fading Environment

In a previous post we had discussed MIMO capacity in a fading environment and compared it to AWGN capacity. It sometimes feels unintuitive that fading capacity can be higher than AWGN capacity. If a signal is continuously fluctuating how is it possible that we are able to have reliable communication. But this is the remarkable feature of MIMO systems that they are able to achieve blazing speeds over an unreliable channel, at least theoretically. It has been shown mathematically that an NxN MIMO channel is equivalent to N SISO channels in parallel.

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Fundamentals of Direction of Arrival Estimation

Direction of Arrival (DOA) estimation is a fundamental problem in communications and signal processing with application in cellular communications, radar, sonar etc. It has become increasingly important in recent times as 5G communications uses DOA to spatially separate the users resulting in higher capacity and throughput. Direction of Arrival estimation can be thought of as the converse of beamforming. As you might recall from the discussion in previous posts, in beamforming you use the steering vector to receive a signal from a particular direction, rejecting the signals from other directions. In DOA estimation you scan the entire angular domain to find the required signal or signals and estimate their angles of arrival and possibly the ranges as well.

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5G Data Rates and Shannon Capacity

Recently I came across a post from T-Mobile in which they claim to have achieved a download speed of 5.6 Gbps over a 100 MHz channel resulting in a Spectral Efficiency of more than 50 bps/Hz. This was achieved in an MU-MIMO configuration with eight connected devices having an aggregate of 16 parallel streams i.e. two parallel streams per device. The channel used for this experiment was the mid-band frequency of 2.5 GHz.

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5G Rollout in the USA: Long Way to Go

There is a 3 way race for 5G leadership in the US between T-Mobile(+Sprint), Verizon and AT&T. There are competing claims for the number of 5G subscribers, coverage area and download speeds. But let us look where the 5G industry stands today compared to the expectations a few years back. More than 80% of US population lives in urban areas which comprise of 2% of the total land area of about 10 million squared kilometers. That is 80% of the population lives in an area of about 200,000 squared kilometers.

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