Pulse Modulation Schemes

Dr. S. Mohandass
Assistant Professor
Dept. of ECE
PSG College of Technology
Contents
 Introduction to Pulse Modulation
 Sampling Process
 Pulse-Amplitude Modulation
 Pulse-Position Modulation
Transition from Analog to Digital Modulation
 Quantization Process
 Pulse-Code Modulation
 Line Codes
 Differential Pulse-Code Modulation
 Applications
 References
 Pulse Modulation
◦ Definition: Some parameter of a pulse train is varied in accordance
with the message signal
◦ Analog pulse modulation
 A periodic pulse train is used as the carrier wave
 Some characteristic feature of each pulse is varied in a continuous manner
in accordance with the corresponding sample value of the message signal
◦ Digital pulse modulation
 The message signal is represented in a form that is discrete in both time
and amplitude
 Transmission of message in digital form as a sequence of coded pulses
◦ Given a strictly band-limited message signal, the sampling theorem
embodies the conditions for a uniformly sampled version of the
signal to preserve its information content
◦ Analog pulse-modulation systems rely on the sampling process to
maintain continuous amplitude representation of the message
signal.
◦ In contrast, digital pulse-modulation system uses not only the
sampling process but also the quantization process.
◦ Digital modulation makes it possible to exploit the full power of
digital signal-processing techniques.
3
Sampling Process
 Instantaneous Sampling and Frequency-Domain
Consequences
◦ Sample the signal g(t) instantaneously and at a uniform
rate
◦ Instantaneously (ideal) sampled signal

 The signal obtained by individually weighting the elements of a
g
periodic sequence(t )  g ( nT ) (t  nTs:)
 of Dirac deltas functions
n 

◦ The process of uniformly sampling a continuous time

signal of finite
 energy results in a periodic
 spectrum with a

n 
g (nT ) (equal
repetition frequency
s t  nTto) 
s s 
the fsampling
G ( f rate.
m 
mf )
s

◦ where G(f) is the Fourier transform of the original signal

g(t) and fs is the sampling rate. 4
Sampling process

Illustration of the sampling process (a) Analog wave-

form g(t)
(b) Instantaneously sampled representation of g(t)
5
Sampling and
Reconstruction
(a) Spectrum of a strictly band-limited
signal
g(t)

(b) Spectrum of instantaneously sam-

pled
version of g(t) for a sampling period
TS = 1/2W

(c) Frequency response of ideal low-

pass filter aimed at recovering the orig-
inal message
signal g(t) from its uniformly sampled
version

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 Sampling Theorem
◦ The sampling theorem for strictly band-limited signals of
finite energy can be stated in two equivalent parts

 Analysis : A band-limited signal of finite energy that has no

frequency components higher than W hertz is completely described
by specifying the values of the signal at instants of time separated
by 1/2W seconds.

 Synthesis : A band-limited signal of finite energy that has no

frequency components higher than W hertz is completely recovered
from knowledge of its samples taken at the rate of 2W samples per
second.

◦ Nyquist rate
 The sampling rate of 2W samples per second for a signal bandwidth
of W hertz

◦ Nyquist interval
 1/2W (measured in seconds)

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 Aliasing Phenomenon
◦ The phenomenon of a high-frequency component in the
spectrum of the signal seemingly taking on the identify of
a lower frequency in the spectrum of its sampled version.

◦ To combat the effects of aliasing in practices

 Prior to sampling a low-pass anti-alias filter is used to attenuate
those high-frequency components of a message signal that are
not essential to the information being conveyed by the signal

 The filtered signal is sampled at a rate slightly higher than the

Nyquist rate.

◦ Physically realizable reconstruction filter

 The reconstruction filter is of a low-pass kind with a passband
extending from –W to W
 The filter has a non-zero transition band extending from W to f s-
W where fs is the sampling rate.

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Spectrum of an undersampled Signal

(a) Spectrum of a signal. (b) Spectrum of an under-sam-

pled
version of the signal exhibiting the aliasing phenome-
non. 9
Spectrum of a signal sampled at a rate greater
than the Nyquist rate

(a) Anti-alias filtered spectrum of an information-bearing signal.

(b) Spectrum of instantaneously sampled version of the signal, assuming
the use
of a sampling rate greater than the Nyquist rate. 10
Pulse Modulation
PAM Modulator and
Demodulator

(a) PAM Modulator

(b) PAM Demodulator

Unipolar and Bipolar PAM

13
Pulse Time Modulation
Pulse Time Modulation (PTM) is a class of signaling technique
that encodes the sample values of an analog signal onto
the time axis of a digital signal (Pulse waveform)

The two main types of pulse time modulation are:

1. Pulse Width Modulation (PWM)
In PWM the sample values of the analog waveform are used
to determine the width of the pulse signal.

2. Pulse Position Modulation (PPM)

In PPM the analog sample values determine the position of
a narrow pulse relative to the clocking time. It is possible to
obtain PPM from PWM by using a mono-stable multivibrator
circuit.
Pulse Width Modulation
Pulse Frequency
Modulation
PFM Demodulation using
PLL
Pulse Position Modulation
PPM Modulator
PPM Waveforms
Transition from Analog to Digital Pulse
Modulation
 The advantages offered by digital pulse modulation
◦ Performance
 Digital pulse modulation permits the use of regenerative repeaters, when
placed along the transmission path at short enough distances, can
practically eliminate the degrading effects of channel noise and signal
distortion.
◦ Ruggedness
 A digital communication system can be designed to withstand the effects
of channel noise and signal distortion
◦ Reliability
 Can be made highly reliable by exploiting powerful error-control coding
techniques.
◦ Security
 Can be made highly secure by exploiting powerful encryption algorithms
◦ Efficiency
 Inherently more efficient than analog communication system in the
tradeoff between transmission bandwidth and signal-to-noise ratio
◦ System integration
 To integrate digitized analog signals with digital computer data

21
Amplitude quantization
◦ The process of transforming the sample amplitude
m(nTs) of a baseband signal m(t) at time t = nTs
into a discrete amplitude v(nTs) taken from a finite
I k : {mk  mlevels.
set of possible mk 1}, k 1,2,..., L

◦ Representation level (or Reconstruction level)

 The amplitudes vk , k=1,2,3,……,L
◦ Quantum (or step-size)
 The spacing between two adjacent representation
levels

v  g (m)

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Types of Quantization

23
Quantization Noise

Illustration of the quantization

process
24
Quantization Noise and and Output
SNR

25
26
27
Output SNR
Signal-to-(quantization) noise ratio for varying
number of
representation levels for sinusoidal modulation
No. of No. of bits per SNR (dB)
representatio sample R
n levels L
32 5 31.8
64 6 37.8
128 7 43.8
256 8 49.8

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 Pulse-Code Modulation (PCM)
 A message signal is represented by a sequence of
coded pulses, which is accomplished by representing
the signal in discrete form in both time and amplitude
 In other words, PCM is a discrete-time, discrete-
amplitude waveform-coding process, by means of
which an analog signal is directly represented by a
sequence of coded pulses.
 The PCM transmitter consists of two components: a
pulse-amplitude modulator followed by an analog-to-
digital (A/D) converter.
 The latter component itself embodies a quantizer
followed by an encoder.
 The receiver performs the inverse of these two
operations: digital-to analog (D/A) conversion followed
by pulse-amplitude demodulation.
 The communication channel is responsible for
transporting the encoded pulses from the transmitter 29
Block Diagram of PCM

30
Basic Elements of a PCM
System

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a) Transmitter Operations
1. Sampling
The incoming message signal is sampled with a train of rec-
tangular pulses

The reduction of the continuously varying message signal to a

limited number of discrete values per second

2. Uniform / Non-uniform Quantization

In Uniform Quantization, step size is constant

In Non-uniform quantization, the step size increases as the

separation from the origin of the input-output amplitude char-
acteristic is increased, the large end-step of the quantizer can
take care of possible excursions of the voice signal into the
large amplitude ranges that occur relatively infrequently.

3. Encoding
To translate the discrete set of sample vales to a more appro-
priate form of signal for transmission

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Quantized Data
Encoding
 Through the combined use of sampling and quantization, the
analog message signal is transformed into a discrete set of
values, but not in the form best suited to transmission over a
telephone line or radio link.
 Encoding process is used to translate the discrete set of sample
values to a more appropriate form of signal.
 The following table describes the one-to-one correspondence
between representation levels and codewords for a binary
number system for R = 4 bits per sample.
 The last signal-processing operation in the transmitter is that of
line coding, the purpose of which is to represent each binary
codeword by a sequence of pulses
 For example, symbol 1 is represented by the presence of a pulse
and symbol 0 is represented by absence of the pulse.
 There are different types of line coding techniques available
which include Unipolar non return-to-zero (NRZ), bipolar NRZ,
Unipolar return-to-zero (RZ), bipolar RZ, and split-phase or
Manchester code.
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Binary code

35
Line Coding Techniques
Line codes for the electrical
representations of binary data:

(a) Unipolar non return-to-zero

(NRZ) signaling;
(b) bipolar NRZ signaling;
(c) unipolar return-to-zero (RZ)
signaling;
(d) bipolar RZ signaling;
(e) split-phase or Manchester
code.

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 b) Regeneration Along the Transmission Path

 The most important feature of a PCM systems is its ability to

control the effects of distortion and noise produced by transmitting
a PCM signal through the channel, connecting the receiver to the
transmitter.
 This capability is accomplished by reconstructing the PCM signal
through a chain of regenerative repeaters, located at sufficiently
close spacing along the transmission path.
 Three basic functions are performed in a regenerative repeater,
which are equalization, timing, and decision making.
◦ Equalizer
 Shapes the received pulses so as to compensate for the effects of
amplitude and phase distortions produced by the transmission
◦ Timing circuitry
 Provides a periodic pulse train, derived from the received pulses, for
sampling the equalized pulses at the instants of time where the SNR
ratio is a maximum.
◦ Decision-making device
 The sample so extracted is compared with a predetermined threshold
 In each bit interval, a decision is then made on whether the received
symbol is 1 or 0 and a clean new pulse is transmitted accordingly. 37
Regenerative Repeater

Block diagram of regenerative re-

peater.
Ideally, except for delay, the regenerated signal is exactly
the same as the information-bearing signal

• The unavoidable presence of channel noise and inter-

ference causes the repeater to make wrong decisions
occasionally, thereby introducing bit errors into the re-
generated signal

• If the spacing between received pulses deviates from

its assigned value, a jitter is introduced into the regen-
erated pulse position, thereby causing distortion.
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 c) Receiver Operations
 The first operation in the receiver of a PCM system is to regenerate
(i.e., reshape and clean up) the received pulses.
 These clean pulses are then regrouped into codewords and decoded
(i.e., mapped back) into a quantized pulse-amplitude modulated
signal.
 The decoding process involves generating a pulse whose amplitude
is the linear sum of all the pulses in the codeword.
 Each pulse is weighted by its place value (2 0, 21, 22, …2R-1) in the
code, where R is the number of bits per sample.
 The final operation in the receiver is that of signal reconstruction,
where an estimate of the original message signal is produced by
passing the decoder output through a low-pass reconstruction filter
whose cutoff frequency is equal to the message bandwidth W.
 Assuming that the transmission link (connecting the receiver to the
transmitter) is error free, the reconstructed message signal includes
no noise with the exception of the initial distortion introduced by 39
Noise Considerations in PCM
Systems
The performance of a PCM system is influenced by
two major sources of noise:
1. Channel noise, which is introduced anywhere
between the transmitter output and the
receiver input
channel noise is always present, once the
equipment is switched on.

2. Quantization noise, which is introduced in the

transmitter and is carried all the way along to
the receiver output
Unlike channel noise, quantization noise is
signal dependent, in the sense that it
disappears when the message signal is
switched off.
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Differential Pulse-Code Modulation
(DPCM)
 DPCM is the scheme to be considered for channel-
bandwidth conservation that exploits the idea of
linear prediction theory with a practical difference:
In the transmitter, the linear prediction is performed
on a quantized version of the message sample
instead of the message sample itself
The resulting process is referred to as differential
quantization.

Block diagram of a differential quantizer

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DPCM Transmitter
 eq ,n 
The quantizer output is given en  qn
by
where qn is the quantization noise produced by the
quantizer operating on the prediction error en
 mq ,n mˆ n  eq ,n
From the figure we can write
wherem̂n is the predicted value of the original
message sample mn mq ,n mˆ n  en  qn
 n m
From the aboveetwo ˆ
n  mn
equations we can write
 The prediction error mq ,n mn  qn
 Combining the above two equations we can write
which describes a quantized version of the original
message sample mn

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DPCM Receiver
• The structure of the receiver is much simpler than that of
the transmitter.
• At first, the decoder reconstructs the quantized version
of the prediction error, namely eq,n.
• An estimate of the original message sample mn is then
computed by applying the decoder output to the same
predictor used in the transmitter.
• In the absence of channel noise, the encoded signal at
the receiver input is identical to the encoded signal at the
transmitter output.
• Under this ideal condition, we find that the correspond-
ing receiver output is equal to mq,n, which differs from the
original signal sample mn only by the quantization error qn
incurred as a result of quantizing the prediction error en.
• In a noise-free environment, the linear FIR predictors in
the transmitter and receiver of DPCM operate on the same
sequence of samples, mq,n.

43
Output SNR and Processing Gain

44
Contd…

45
PCM vs. DPCM
 The objective in implementing the DPCM should be to
design the prediction filter so as to minimize the
prediction-error variance
 In the case of voice signals, it is found that the optimum
signal-to-quantization noise advantage of the DPCM over
the standard PCM is in the neighborhood of 4 –11dB.
 Based on experimental studies, it appears that the
greatest improvement occurs in going from no prediction
to first-order prediction, with some additional gain
resulting from increasing the order p of the prediction
filter up to 4 or 5, after which little additional gain is
obtained.
 For a constant signal-to-quantization noise ratio, and
assuming a sampling rate of 8 kHz, the use of DPCM
may provide a saving of about 8 –16 kb/s (i.e., 1 to 2 bits
per sample) compared with the standard PCM.

46
Applications of Pulse Modulation
Techniques
 Time-division Multiplexing
◦ Enables the joint utilization of a common communication
channel by sharing the channel between independent
message sources without mutual interference among them
◦ Highly sensitive to dispersion in the common channel

 Synchronization
◦ Need for a local clock at the receiver to keep the same
time as a distant standard clock at the transmitter
◦ One possible procedure to synchronize the transmitter and
receiver clocks is to set aside a code element or
synchronizing pulse at the end of a frame and to transmit
this pulse every other frame only
◦ During the synchronization process at the receiver, the
synchronizing pulse will be detected.

47
Delta Modulation (DM)

48
Delta Modulation

49
Two types of noise in DM
Slope-overload Noise
Granular Noise

50
Adaptive Delta Modulation
(ADM)

51
ADM

52
Delta-Sigma Modulation
(DSM)

53
Delta-Sigma Modulation
Advantages of using Integrator
◦ The low-frequency content of the input
signal is pre-emphasized
◦ Correlation between adjacent samples of the
delta modulator is increased, which tends to
improve the overall system performance by
reducing the variance of the error signal at
the quantizer input
◦ Design of the receiver is simplified
Delta-sigmamodulator is referred as
smoothed version of 1-bit pulse code
modulator
54
References
 Haykin S, “Digital Communication Systems”, John
Wiley & Sons, 2014.
 Lathi B P, “Modern Digital and Analog communication
Systems”, Oxford University Press, 2010.
 Proakis J.G and Salehi M, “Fundamentals of
Communication Systems” Pearson, 2011.
 Bernard Sklar, “Digital Communications”, Pearson
Education Asia, Sixth reprint, 2005.

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