Analysis of FM demodulator output noise with applications to FM telemetry.pdfVIP

ANALYSIS OF FM DEMODULATOR OUTPUT NOISE WITH APPLICATIONS TO FM TELEMETRY RAJENDRA KUMAR Received 9 December 2005; Revised 10 February 2006; Accepted 20 February 2006 We present an analysis for evaluating the probability density function (pdf) of the noise at the output of the frequency demodulator. It is shown that the noise is non-Gaussian and that for low to medium signal-to-noise power ratios, its pdf differs very significantly from the Gaussian pdf commonly assumed in simplified analysis. These results are very important for analyzing the performance of the PCM/FM type of modulation schemes used in telemetry systems as illustrated in the paper. Copyright © 2006 Rajendra Kumar. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. 1. Introduction This paper presents an exact analysis for the probability density function (pdf) of the noise at the output of a frequency demodulator. In the literature [1, 5], the FM demod- ulator output noise is assumed to be Gaussian-distributed at high signal-to-noise power ratio (SNR). At low SNR, it is analyzed in terms of a Gaussian noise and a sequence of impulse functions (clicks) based on the classical theory propounded by Rice [4]. In such an analysis, assuming relatively low bandwidth of the postdemodulator lowpass (LPF) fil- ter, the variance of the total noise power at the filter output is evaluated. The probability distribution of the filter output noise is assumed to be Gaussian. While such an analysis is adequate for the case of analog information signals such as speech, for the case of digital signals, one of the most important characteristics of the noise is its pdf. This paper presents an exact analysis of the FM demodulator output noise under the assumption of low-modulation index and Gaussian-distributed noise at the demodu