PCM Noise and Companding
PCM Noise and Companding
PCM Noise and Companding
Quantization Noise
Signal to Noise Ratio
PCM Telephone System
Nonuniform Quantization
Companding
Huseyin Bilgekul
Eeng360 Communication Systems I
Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering
Eastern Mediterranean University
Quantization Noise
The process of quantization can be interpreted as an additive noise
process.
Signal
X
Quantized Signal
XQ
Quantization Noise
nQ
Two main effects produce the noise or distortion in the PCM output:
Quantizing noise that is caused by the M-step quantizer at the PCM transmitter.
Bit errors in the recovered PCM signal, caused by channel noise and improper filtering.
If the input analog signal is band limited and sampled fast enough so that the aliasing noise on the
recovered signal is negligible, the ratio of the recovered analog peak signal power to the total average
noise power is:
The ratio of the average signal power to the average noise power is
If Pe is negligible, there are no bit errors resulting from channel noise and no ISI, the Peak SNR resulting from
only quantizing error is:
Where, M = 2n
= 4.77 for peak SNR
= 0 for average SNR
Assume that an analog audio voice-frequency(VF) telephone signal occupies a band from 300
to 3,400Hz. The signal is to be converted to a PCM signal for transmission over a digital
telephone system. The minimum sampling frequency is 2x3.4 = 6.8 ksample/sec.
To be able to use of a low-cost low-pass antialiasing filter, the VF signal is oversampled with
a sampling frequency of 8ksamples/sec.
This is the standard adopted by the Unites States telephone industry.
Assume that each sample values is represented by 8 bits; then the bit rate of the binary PCM
signal is
This 64-kbit/s signal is called a DS-0 signal (digital signal, type zero).
The minimum absolute bandwidth of the binary PCM signal is
BPCM
R nf s
2
2
If we use a rectangular pulse for sampling the first null bandwidth is given by
We require a bandwidth of 64kHz to transmit this digital voice PCM signal, whereas the bandwidth of the original
analog voice signal was, at most, 4kHz.
Note:
1.
Coding with parity bits does NOT affect the quantizing noise,
2.
Nonuniform Quantization
Many signals such as speech have a nonuniform distribution.
The amplitude is more likely to be close to zero than to be at higher levels.
Nonuniform quantizers have unequally spaced levels
The spacing can be chosen to optimize the SNR for a particular type of signal.
Output sample
XQ
6
4
-8
-6
-4
-2
2
-2
-4
-6
Input sample
X
Companding
Nonuniform quantizers are difficult to make and expensive.
An alternative is to first pass the speech signal through a
nonlinearity before quantizing with a uniform quantizer.
The nonlinearity causes the signal amplitude to be
Compressed.
The input to the quantizer will have a more uniform
distribution.
At the receiver, the signal is Expanded by an inverse to the
nonlinearity.
The process of compressing and expanding is called
Companding.
-Law Companding
1
Output |x(t)|
ln(1 | x (t )|)
ln(1 )
1
Input |x(t)|
Voice signals are more likely to have amplitudes near zero than at extreme peaks.
For such signals with non-uniform amplitude distribution quantizing noise will be
higher for amplitude values near zero.
A technique to increase amplitudes near zero is called Companding.
x
C(.)
Compressor
Q(
)
Uniform Quantizer
.
x[n]=speech /song/
0.5
0
-0.5
-1
1000
2000
3000
4000
5000
6000
7000
8000
9000
10000
1000
2000
3000
4000
5000
6000
7000
8000
9000
10000
y[n]=C(x[n])
Companded Signal
0.5
0
-0.5
-1
Segment of
x[n]
0.5
0
-0.5
-1
2200
2300
2400
2500
2600
2700
2800
2900
3000
2300
2400
2500
2600
2700
2800
2900
3000
Segment of y[n]
Companded Signal
0.5
0
-0.5
-1
2200
SNR of Compander
The output SNR is a function of input signal level for uniform quantizing.
But it is relatively insensitive for input level for a compander
= 4.77 - 20 log[Ln(1 + )]
= 4.77 - 20 log[1 + Ln A]