Course No.

EEE 6202
Advanced Telecommunication Engineering

Project No. 01

A Simulation-Based Analysis: Impact of Pulse Shaping on the BER Performance of

Digital Modulation Techniques

Submitted by
Md. Mehedi Hossen Limon
Student No. 0419062283

Submitted to
Dr. Md. Farhad Hossain
Professor

Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering

Bangladesh University of Engineering and Technology
Dhaka, Bangladesh

July 27, 2019

 A Simulation-Based Analysis: Impact of Pulse
Shaping on the BER Performance of Digital
Modulation Techniques

Mehedi Hossen Limon

Student ID No. 0419062283
E-mail: mhlimon1995@gmail.com
Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering
Bangladesh University of Engineering and Technology, Dhaka-1205

Abstract—In communication systems, the transmission of
pulses involves an important process called pulse shaping
which acts as a tool in monitoring and analyzing different
parameters. For limiting effective transmission bandwidth pa-
rameters like Intersymbol interference (ISI), envelope unifor-
mity of modulated signal and phase continuity, pulse shaping
is used. This makes the transmitted signal better suited to
its purpose. To evaluate the impact of pulse shaping on the
transmitted pulse, in this paper, Bit error rate(BER) at various
SNR values are calculated. Different pulse shaping scheme
like Rectangular, Raised cosine (RC) and Root raised cosine
(RRC) are used to compare BER performance. Also, the effects
of these pulse shaping scheme on the BER performance of
different digital modulation techniques such as BPSK, QPSK,
16-QAM and 64-QAM are analyzed.
Keywords—Intersymbol interference, Raised Cosine Filter,
Root Raised Cosine Filter, BPSK, QPSK, QAM, Bit Error Rate,
Pulse shaping,
They also suggested a pulse-shaping technique superior
to various other pulse-shaping techniques and its practical
implementation. In addition to this comparison of perfor-
mance metrics for QPSK and OQPSK transmission using
the pulse-shaping filters mentioned above is discussed by
Chattopadhyay et. al. for different applications in mobile
communication [2]. BER performance evaluation of raised
cosine and different FIR filter under AWGN channel is
presented by Teji et. al. [3]
In this paper, BER is calculated for a different pulse-
shaping technique such as Rectangular, RRC and RC filters
in case of BPSK, QPSK, 16-QAM and 64-QAM modulation
using MATLAB Simulink. Also, a comparison of these
different schemes is presented. The graphical representation
of BER vs SNR would provide the selection criterion for the
pulse-shaping filters for different modulation techniques.

I. I NTRODUCTION II. S YSTEM M ODEL

In many modern data transmission systems (e.g. mobile Fig- 1 shows the link model with BPSK modulator and
phones, HDTV), increasing data transmission rate to its demodulator and Rectangular pulse-shaping scheme is used
maximum and decreasing transmission errors to its mini- to calculate the bit error rate. To observe the impact of
mum play important role. For this purpose, pulse shaping these different pulse-shaping filters, QPSK, 16-QAM and
filters are used to keep a signal in an allotted bandwidth. 64-QAM modulator and demodulators are used to calculate
the BER in these cases. AWGN channel is used to transmit
An ideal pulse shaping filter has two characteristic i.e it
the signal.
reduces the inter-channel interference as much as possible
and minimizes intersymbol interference to acquire a bit
error rate as low as possible. However, a time-domain sinc
pulse has these characters but this filter is not realizable.
Another pulse shaping filter like a Raised cosine filter is
typically used to shape and oversample a bitstream before
transmission. The data stream is up-sampled and filtered at
the transmitter and then this transmitted signal is filtered and
down-sampled by a matched filter at the receiver. Cascading
of two Root raised cosine filters is equivalent to a Raised
cosine filter.
Bit error rate(BER) of transmission is one of the metrics
to analyze the quality of transmission. The error rate is
driven by the input signal and channel SNR or more Fig. 1. Simulink model of the system to calculate BER performance with
conveniently, Eb /N0 . The channel distortions result in ISI BPSK modulation and Raised cosine pulse-shaping scheme
at the output of the demodulator which makes the BER
performance degraded by increasing the probability of error
at the detector.
Pulse Shaping Scheme
Sharma et. al. analyzed the effect of pulse shaping of
QAM modulated OFDM signal and compared the perfor- To determine the effect of other pulse-shaping filters,
mance of Rectangular, Raised cosine and BTRC pulse [1]. Raised cosine and Root raised cosine filters are used in
 M-ary QAM involves the amplitude modulation of two
1 0.6 carriers in quadrature expressed as
0.9
0.5
0.8

0.7 0.4 s(t) = Ac cos (2πfc ) t − As sin (2πfc t) 0≤t<T

0.6
Amplitude

0.3

Amplitude
0.5

0.4
0.2 where Ac and As are the signal amplitudes of the in-phase
0.3 0.1 and quadrature components respectively. T is the symbol
0.2

0.1
0 duration and fc is the carrier frequency [5].
0 -0.1

-2 0 2 4
Samples
6 8 10 0 2 4 6
Samples
8 10 12 In this analysis, 16-QAM and 64-QAM modulation are
(a) (b)
used to show BER performance of the different pulse-
shaping filter.
0.6

0.5
III. R ESULTS AND D ISCUSSION
0.4

0.3
In this paper, three different pulse-shaping scheme is
Amplitude

0.2
used to compute the BER in combination with four different
0.1 modulation scheme with the presence of AWGN channel.
0

-0.1

0 2 4 6 8 10 12
Samples 10 0
BPSK
QPSK
(c) 16-QAM
32-QAM
10 -1
Fig. 2. (a),(b) and (c) are time domain representation of Rectangular,
Raised cosine and Root raised cosine pulse-shaping filter. A roll-off factor
0.25 is used.
10 -2

place of Rectangular filter. Fig- 2a shows the time-domain

BER

10 -3

representation of the Rectangular pulse shaping filter.

These filters satisfy zero ISI criteria. Time-domain rep- 10 -4

resentation of Raised cosine filter [4] is given by

10 -5

sin(πt/T ) cos(παt/T )
gRC (t) = (1)
πt/T 1 − (2αt/T )2 10 -6
0 5 10 15 20 25
Eb /N 0 (dB)
and its impulse response or time domain representation is
depicted in Fig- 2b
Fig. 3. BER performance in AWGN channel using rectangular pulse
To ensure zero ISI for the complete data link, the best shaping scheme
choice is to use a match filter which leads us to Root raised
cosine filter. The corresponding time domain representation
is given by Fig- 3 depicts the BER performance of different mod-
ulation scheme for a rectangular pulse shaping scheme.
sin(π(1 − α)t/T ) + 4α(t/T ) cos(π(1 + α)t/T ) This figure shows that the BER of PSK curves has higher
GRRC (t) = downward slopes than the QAM modulation curves. For this
π [1 − (4αt/T )2 ) (t/T )
(2) case, BPSK is better than the other modulation scheme.
which is shown in Fig- 2c. Also, as the SNR decreases with the reduced noise level,
BER of all modulation scheme decreases, which means
decreasing noise has a significant role to reduce the bit error
Modulation Schemes
rate.
For better transmission of data, BER performance for
BER performance goes through significant change if
various digital modulation techniques needs to be analyzed.
the raised cosine filter is used for pulse shaping. Fig- 4
In M-PSK modulation technique where the baseband shows the BER performance for Raised cosine filter with
block modulates an input signal with M-ary phase-shift a roll-off factor of 0.2. In this case, the BER performance
keying (PSK) and returns a complex baseband output. The doesn’t improve with SNR as significant as it shows for a
block accepts scalar or column vector input signals. The rectangular pulse shaping scheme. Rather, BER for BPSK
block outputs a baseband signal by mapping input bits or modulation increases with SNR. For higher SNR level, BER
integers to complex symbols according to the following. of 16-QAM becomes close to the BER of BPSK and QPSK
scheme. BER of 32-QAM modulation also decreases but not
as much as 16-QAM. The BER performance can be changed
by changing the roll of the factor of the Raised cosine filter
  
2n + 1
sn (t) = exp jπ ; n ∈ {0, 1, . . . , M − 1} as shown by Sudipta et. al. [2]
M
BER performance of root raised cosine filter is almost
For BPSK and QPSK scheme, the value of M is respec- similar to the Raised cosine filter which is shown in Fig- 5.
tively 2 and 4. However, as stated earlier, it is used to achieve zero ISI.
 [3] M. K. Teji, “Bit Error Rate evaluation of Pulse Shaping Filters under
AWGN Channel,” in International Journal of Computer Trends and
QPSK
0.9
BPSK
Technology (IJCTT), vol. 41, no. 1, 2016, pp. 48–53.
16-QAM
0.85 32-QAM [4] J. Crawford, Advanced Phase-Lock Techniques. Artech House,
Boston,London, 2008.
0.8
[5] D. Yoon, K. Cho, and J. Lee, “Bit error probability of M-ary
0.75 quadrature amplitude modulation,” in Vehicular Technology Confer-
ence Fall 2000. IEEE VTS Fall VTC2000. 52nd Vehicular Technology
0.7
Conference (Cat. No. 00CH37152), vol. 5. IEEE, 2000, pp. 2422–
BER

2427.
0.65

0.6

0.55

0.5

0 5 10 15 20 25
Eb /N 0 (dB)

Fig. 4. BER performance in AWGN channel using Raised cosine pulse

shaping scheme. A roll-off factor of 0.2 is used.

32-QAM
0.9 16-QAM
QPSK
0.85 BPSK

0.8

0.75

0.7
BER

0.65

0.6

0.55

0.5

0 5 10 15 20 25
Eb /N 0 (dB)

Fig. 5. BER performance in AWGN channel using Root raised cosine

pulse shaping scheme. A roll-off factor of 0.2 is used.

IV. C ONCLUSIONS
In this paper, the BER performance of different mod-
ulation scheme with various pulse shaping filter schemes
are analyzed using Simulink. As the SNR increases, BER
decreases for all the cases. Also, BPSK has a better BER
performance which makes it suitable if spectral efficiency is
not taken into consideration. Rectangular pulse shape filter is
the most suitable in case of BER performance, but realizing
this filter is difficult. For a higher modulation scheme, Root
raised and raised cosine filter can be used as a practical
pulse shaping filter.

R EFERENCES
[1] D. K. Sharma, A. Mishra, and R. Saxena, “Effect of Pulse Shaping on
BER Performance of QAM Modulated OFDM Signal,” International
Journal of Computing Science and Communication Technologies,
vol. 4, no. 2, pp. 1–8, 2012.
[2] S. Chattopadhyay and C. Author, “Comparison of Performance Met-
rics for QPSK and OQPSK Transmission Using Root Raised Cosine
& Raised Cosine Pulse-shaping Filters for Applications in Mobile
Communication,” in (IJCSIS) International Journal of Computer
Science and Information Security, vol. 6, no. 2, 2009, pp. 106–112.