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Pulse-position modulation
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Pulse-position modulation (PPM) is a form of signal modulation in which M message bits are encoded by transmitting a single pulse in one of 2M possible timeshifts. This is repeated every T seconds, such that the transmitted bit rate is M/T bits per second. It is primarily useful for optical communications systems, where there tends to be little or no multipath interference.
Contents
1 Synchronization 2 Sensitivity to multipath interference 3 Non-coherent detection 4 PPM vs. M-FSK 5 Applications for RF Communications 6 See also
Modulation techniques Analog modulation AM SSB QAM FM PM SM Digital modulation FSK ASK OOK PSK QAM MSK CPM PPM TCM OFDM Spread spectrum CSS DSSS FHSS THSS See also: Demodulation, modem
Synchronization
One of the key difficulties of implementing this technique is that the receiver must be properly synchronized to align the local clock with the beginning of each symbol. Therefore, it is often implemented differentially as differential pulse-position modulation, where by each pulse position is encoded relative to the previous , such that the receiver must only measure the difference in the arrival time of successive pulses. It is possible to limit the propagation of errors to adjacent symbols, so that an error in measuring the differential delay of one pulse will affect only two symbols, instead of affecting all successive measurements.
Non-coherent detection
One of the principal advantages of PPM is that it is an M-ary modulation technique that can be implemented non-coherently, such that the receiver does not need to use a phase-locked loop (PLL) to track the phase of the carrier. This makes it a suitable candidate for optical communications systems, where coherent phase modulation and detection are difficult and extremely expensive. The only other common M-ary non-coherent modulation technique is M-ary Frequency Shift Keying (MFSK), which is the frequency-domain dual to PPM.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pulse-position_modulation
12/11/2009
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PPM and M-FSK systems with the same bandwidth, average power, and transmission rate of M/T bits per second have identical performance in an AWGN (Additive White Gaussian Noise) channel. However, their performance differs greatly when comparing frequency-selective and frequency-flat fading channels. Whereas frequency-selective fading produces echoes that are highly disruptive for any of the M time-shifts used to encode PPM data, it selectively disrupts only some of the M possible frequency-shifts used to encode data for M-FSK. Conversely, frequency-flat fading is more disruptive for M-FSK than PPM, as all M of the possible frequency-shifts are impaired by fading, while the short duration of the PPM pulse means that only a few of the M time-shifts are heavily impaired by fading. Optical communications systems (even wireless ones) tend to have weak multipath distortions, and PPM is a viable modulation scheme in many such applications.
See also
Pulse-amplitude modulation Pulse-code modulation Pulse-density modulation Pulse-width modulation Ultra wideband Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pulse-position_modulation" Categories: Radio modulation modes This page was last modified on 6 November 2009 at 07:17. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License; additional terms may apply. See Terms of Use for details. Wikipedia is a registered trademark of the Wikimedia Foundation, Inc., a non-profit organization.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pulse-position_modulation
12/11/2009