Simulink and FPAA Implementation of FSK Signals

Abstract

Fundamental to all wireless communication is modulation, the process in which the message data is transmitted on a high frequency radio carrier. Most of the wireless transmissions today are digital as it has more advantages than analog; the effect of distortion, noise, interference is minimized through the use of ingenious digital signal processing as compared to analog communication system. In this paper, we have considered binary frequency shift keying (BFSK) as the modulation technique to send data over a wireless channel. The corresponding demodulator is responsible for retrieving the transmitted data from the noisy, faded signal as impacted by the channel. The metric usually used to evaluate a digital modulation scheme is its average probability of bit error. We have evaluated the bit error rate (BER) of BFSK signals in both the additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN) and flat Rayleigh fading channels. The evaluation has been carried out in both MATLAB and SIMULINK platforms which are subsequently validated by the corresponding theoretical values. After the simulated, BER values are verified and matched with their corresponding theoretical values, hardware realizations have been attempted. The contribution of this paper is (a) the BER evaluation of BFSK through MATLAB simulation and SIMULINK platform, followed by theoretical validations in two different channels and (b) investigation of a hardware platform called Field Programmable Analog Array (FPAA) to build and test a BFSK modulator demodulator (MODEM). Test results show promising outcomes as to the suitability of such MODEM. Indeed data is retrieved at the expense of a small delay.