Signal Bias in Digital Communication Systems

Software RF (Radio Frequency) defined systems have improved the speed and flexibility of testing and measuring RF standards. Such systems make it possible for researchers to implement, test and perform analysis to emerging technologies. In this work, the implementation of a digital communication system is used to test the effects of bias coding on the performance of a multilevel digital communication system in terms of BER (Bit Error Rate) and power consumption which has received little attention from researchers but is nonetheless well worthy of research. Signal Bias changes the statistics of the transmitted signal and as a result changes the statistics of the received signal and therefore, the decision making in the discriminator has to take account of these changes. This possibility gives rise to achieve better BER and to minimize the average energy, which will be the focus of this research. The communication system will be designed and built around National Instrument's PXI-1045 RF platform. Naturally, NI-LabVIEW was the programming tool used as a user interface to design, implement and analyse the performance of such systems.