Digital Modulation
Techniques
Introduction
• In the transmitter, the precoder performs level
conversion and then encodes the incoming
data into groups of bits that modulate an
• The modulated carrier is shaped (filtered),
analog carrier.
amplified, and then transmitted through the
transmission medium to the receiver.
• The transmission medium can be a metallic
cable, optical fiber cable, Earth's atmosphere, or
a combination of two or more types of
• In the receiver, the incoming signals are
filtered, amplified, and then applied to the
demodulator and decoder circuits, which
extracts the original source information from
the modulated carrier.
• The clock and carrier recovery circuits recover
the analog carrier and digital timing (clock)
• Modulation is defined as the process by which some
characteristics of a carrier is varied in accordance
with a modulating wave.
• In digital communications, the modulating wave
consists of binary data or an M-ary encoded version
of it and the carrier is sinusoidal wave.
• Different Shift keying methods that are used in
digital modulation techniques are
I. Amplitude shift keying [ASK]
• The resulting binary wave [in unipolar form]
and sinusoidal carrier φ1 (t) are applied to a
product modulator. The desired BASK
wave is obtained at the modulator output.
• In demodulator, the received noisy BASK
signal x(t) is apply to correlator with
coherent reference signal φ1 (t) as shown in
fig. (b).
•
The correlator output x is compared with
threshold λ.
• The probability of error is given by
• Incoherent detection as used in analog
communication does not require carrier for
reconstruction. The simplest form of incoherent
detector is the envelope detector as shown in
• The output of envelope detector is the baseband
signal. Once the baseband signal is recovered, its
samples are taken at regular intervals and
compared with threshold.
• If Z(t) is greater than threshold ( λ ) a decision
will be made in favour of symbol ‘1’.
• If Z(t) the sampled value is less than threshold ( λ )
a decision will be made in favor of symbol ‘0’.
communicate ‘0’s and ‘1’s., The output of filter is
envelope detected and then baseband detected using an
integrate and dump operation.
• The detector is simply evaluating which of two
possible sinusoids is stronger at the receiver. If we
take the difference of the outputs of the two envelope
detectors the result is bipolar baseband.
• The resulting envelope detector outputs are sampled
at t = kTb and their values are compared with the
• In a Coherent binary PSK system the pair of
signals S1(t) and S2(t) are used to represent
binary symbol ‘1’ and ‘0’ respectively.
• A DPSK system may be viewed as the non
coherent version of the PSK. It eliminates
the need for coherent reference signal at
the receiver by combining two basic
operations at the transmitter
[Link] encoding of the input binary
wave and
• To send symbol ‘0’ we phase advance the
current signal waveform by 1800 and to send
symbol 1 we leave the phase of the current
signal waveform unchanged.
• The differential encoding process at the
transmitter input starts with an arbitrary first
but, securing as reference and thereafter the
Where bk is the input binary digit at time kTb
and dk-1 is the previous value of the
differentially encoded digit. Table illustrate the
logical operation involved in the generation of
DPSK signal.
• A DPSK demodulator is as shown in fig(b). The
received signal is first passed through a BPF
centered at carrier frequency fc to limit noise
power.
•
The filter output and its delay version are applied
to correlator; the resulting output of correlator is
proportional to the cosine of the difference
• If correlator output is +ve -- A decision is made
in favour of symbol ‘1’
• If correlator output is -ve --- A decision is made
in favour of symbol ‘0’
• Fig(a) shows a block diagram of a typical QPSK
transmitter, the incoming binary data sequence is
first transformed into polar form by a NRZ level
encoder. Thus the symbols 1& 0 are represented by:
• This binary wave is next divided by means of a
demultiplexer [Serial to parallel conversion] into
two separate binary waves consisting of the odd
and even numbered input bits. These two binary
• In QPSK system the information carried by the
transmitted signal is contained in the phase. The
transmitted signals are given by