Tutorials

Tutorial title: Multirate Signal Processing in Communication Systems

Author: Frederick Harris

Affiliation: San Diego State University, San Diego, California, USA

Tutorial outline:

Multirate Signal Processing offers the option of accomplishing a given digital signal processing task with the smallest expenditure of energy and with the smallest signal processing resources. Is everyone listening? This is an amazing statement and consequently, we should all be advocates of multirate signal processing! Multirate signal processing has found its way into many DSP text books and is part of the title of at least six textbooks. The most common theme in these many books and in these many chapters is the critically sampled perfect reconstruction filter bank. These amazing systems, embedded in all MP3 recorders, enable aliasing at the filter bank band edges due to down sampling to be canceled during the up sampling in the reconstruction process. What we learn here is that aliasing is OK if you do it right! What we miss is how aliasing can be used in a very much wider class of tasks, and in particular to numerous communication system applications. These include timing recovery in digital receivers, arbitrary resamplers in modulators and demodulators, clock domain alignment between arbitrary asynchronous systems, cascade down-sampling and up-sampling to obtain minimum resource filtering, alias based up or down conversion embedded in the down-sampling and up-sampling process, and many others. This tutorial will review multirate filters in the standard FIR configuration as well as the IIR configurations. We will emphasis concept, will be light on mathematics, and will develop and illustrate many communication system applications.

Author information:



Frederick J Harris holds the CUBIC Signal Processing Chair of the Communication Systems and Signal Processing Institute at San Diego State University where since 1967 he has taught courses in Digital Signal Processing and Communication Systems. He has extensive practical experience in communication systems, high performance modems, sonar and advanced radar systems and high performance laboratory instrumentation. He holds a number of patents on digital receiver and DSP technology and lectures throughout the world on DSP applications. He consults for organizations requiring high performance, cost effective DSP solutions.

His special areas of concentration are Signal Processing Algorithms, and in particular Multirate Signal Processing, Modem Design, Synchronization Techniques, and Fast Algorithms. He is the author of the book "Multirate Signal Processing for Communication Systems" and has contributed to a number of other books and encyclopedia articles on various DSP techniques. In 1990 and 1991 he was the Technical and then the General Chair of the Asilomar Conference on Signals, Systems, and Computers and was Technical Chair of the 2003 Software Defined Radio Conference and the Technical Chair of the 2006 Wireless Personal Multimedia Conference. He became a Fellow of the IEEE in 2003, cited for contributions of DSP to communications systems and has been awarded the 2006 Lifetime Achievement award by the Software Defined Radio Forum.