QAM and PSK Modulation Schemes under Impulsive Noise

Abstract:    Nowadays most of the communications systems are designed considering only to work under AWGN (Additive White Gaussian Noise). But the implementation of wireless systems in industrial facilities brings different kind of interference from machines or any other kind of electronic devices. Some of them are sources of randomly and high power noise, which commonly is known as impulsive noise. The objective in this thesis is to study the impact of the impulsive noise on a communication using QAM (Quadrature Amplitude Modulation) and PSK (Phase-Shift Keying) schemes, by observing the BER (Bit Error Rate) and the APD (Amplitude Probability Distribution). For that, it is developed a measurement method that will be used in a real industrial environment in future work.      The content of this thesis is divided in two parts. In the first part is made a program in MATLAB to simulate the communication through a noisy channel. Then is developed a measurement method which is tested in three different ways corresponding to 3 different outputs of an spectrum analyzer, namely, 20,4 MHz IF output, video output and IQ data output.      The relation of impulsive noise is presented in the second part with different statistical properties in the BER and the APD, in the setup with the best performance. At the end of the thesis a concluding section summarizes the results obtained during the work and some lines of future work in a real industrial environment with the developed method.