Noise Sensitivity of AM vs FM

Hanis Ramli, Hambaly Abdullah, Latifah Mat Nen, Shahmi Shokri, Zulhelmi Iskandar
AbstractNowadays, frequency modulated (FM) signals are preferred than amplitude modulated (AM) signals. There are several reasons why this is true. This paper discusses one of the factors why FM signals are favorable, which is the sensitivity (immunity) against noise. This means that the power of noise that is distorting the modulated signal is less than the power of the original modulated signal. The most convenient method to study this behavior is called Signal-to-noise ratio (SNR). In order to make a fair comparison between AM and FM signals, both of them will have equal bandwidths and power. Then, the SNR is calculated after the signals are demodulated from their carriers. The signal with the lowest SNR value will have the lowest sensitivity to noise. In this experiment, we have shown that the FM signal is more immune to noise than AM signal.
I. INTRODUCTION

which is a summation of unwanted or disturbing energy from man-made and natural sources. In this project, SNR will be measured in decibel unit which is 20 times the log of 10 of the ratio of signal and noise. In this project, we want to investigate which type of modulation will produce the highest SNR and also which method will produce the highest power at the output. A handel signal is loaded into Matlab and a generated noise is added to the signal. This signal will be modulated using the DSB-SC modulation and also using the frequency modulation. Based on the modulated signal, the SNR of the signal are calculated. Signal with the highest SNR would have the highest sensitivity. II. METHOD A. Data The original message signal, handel.mat is an audioplayer object acquired from Matlab library. The length of this signal is 9 seconds with a sampling rate of 8192 Hz. The Fourier transform of this signal is the following plot:
original signal spectrum 15000

HE main goal of this project is to explore and compare the noise sensitivity of AM signal versus FM signal. An AM signal is a signal where the amplitude of the signal is modulated while an FM signal is a signal where the frequency of the signal is modulated. In this project, an audioplayer object from the Matlab library called handel is used as the sample signal. The same signal is used for modulations; frequency modulation and amplitude modulation, so that the resulted signal have the same bandwidth and power. Bandwidth is the range of frequencies that a channel can transmit with reasonable fidelity. In order to compute the sensitivity of modulation, the SNR method is used. SNR is defined as the ratio of signal power to the noise corrupting the signal. A ratio higher than 1:1 indicates that the amplitude of the signal is higher than the noise. Noise is an error or undesired disturbance on useful information signal,

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H. Abdullah is now with the Electrical Engineering Department, Vanderbilt University, Nashville, TN. He was in charge of modulating the input signal into FM and AM signals. Z. Iskandar is also with the Electrical Engineering Department, Vanderbilt University, Nashville, TN. He was in charge of filtering the modulated signals using a bandpass filter in order to equalize the signals' bandwidths. L. M. Nen is also with the Electrical Engineering Department, Vanderbilt University, Nashville, TN. She was in charge of calculating the power of the modulated signals and normalize one signal in favor of the other. In this experiment, the AM power is in favor. S. Shokri is also with the Electrical Engineering Department, Vanderbilt University, Nashville, TN. He was in charge of adding random noise to the equalized modulated signals. H. Ramli is also with the Electrical Engineering Department, Vanderbilt University, Nashville, TN. He was in charge of calculating the SNR of the signals after modulation and demodulation.

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Fig 1. Fourier transform of Handel. This figure shows the original input signal in frequency domain. This figure will be the main reference for the rest of this simulation in order to determine the noise effect on the input signal.

Flow diagram of procedures

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Fig 2. The flow diagram of the procedures done in the project. The figure shows the step by step procedures starting from signal modulation until the calculation of SNR. The SNR is calculated by taking the power ratio of the input signal, y(t) against the demodulated signals, y1(t) and y2(t). B. Simulations All simulation codes are written in the document, eece252finalproject.m. (See appendix). In this simulation, the sampling frequency is higher than the original signals frequency. For this purpose, we use a sampling frequency of 20 x 8192 = 163 840 Hz. This is to ensure we met the Nyquist criterion to avoid aliasing. Also, the carrier frequency used is 40 000 Hz. 1) Modulating the signal using AM scheme The carrier frequency (fc) used is 40 kHz. The Handel signal, m(t) is modulated using the equation:

Fig 3. Frequency spectrum of AM signal. Two blobs of original signal are at the carrier frequency but with lower amplitude. Based on the figure above, the message signal is concentrated at the carrier frequency (positive and negative). 2) Modulating the signal using FM scheme Similar to AM signal, the carrier frequency used is 40 kHz. The frequency deviation, f, was chosen to be 2000 with the modulation index, = 1. The message is modulated according to this equation:

FM = A cos(C t + K f m( )d ) (2)
The following graph is the frequency spectrum of the FM signal:
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modulated signal spectrum (FM)

AM = m(t ) cos(ct )

(1)
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Using this equation, a cosine function with angular frequency of 2(40000) rad/s was multiplied to the input signal. The frequency spectrum of the AM signal is the following:

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Fig 4. Frequency spectrum of FM signal. Two blobs of original signal spectrum are at the carrier frequency but with two tall spikes indicating the carrier spectrum.

Based on the plot above, a tall spike is observed at the carrier frequency (positive and negative). This spike is the delta function which corresponds to the Fourier transform of cosine. The message has been incorporated into the cosine during modulation.

Based on the plots above, we can see that both signals have the same bandwidth of approximately 8 kHz. 3) Computing the power of the filtered modulated signals This step is required to make sure that the powers of the signals are equal. If they are not equal, one of the signals will be normalized in favor of the other. In this case, in favor of the AM signal. This choice is arbitrary. During this simulation, the power was 4 calculated to be 8.0506 10 W. 4) Generated noise was added to both modulated signals (bandpassed filtered signals with equal power and bandwidth) The noise was generated using a Gaussian random number generator for real numbers between 0 and 1. The noise was then directly added to the modulated signals. The resulting signals are:
modulated signal with noise spectrum (AM) after bandpass filter 5000

Feeding the modulated signals through a bandpass filter.

This step is crucial in order to equalize the bandwidth of the modulated signals so that fair comparison can be made. The same bandpass filter is applied to both AM and FM signals. The resulting signals are as follow (plotted in frequency space):
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Fig 5. Frequency spectrum of bandpassed AM signal. From the figure, the bandpassed AM signal is almost the same as the original modulated signal but with lower amplitude.
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Fig 7. Frequency spectrum of noisy AM signal. The noise causes the jitters which can be seen by the random fluctuation in the signals amplitude.
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Fig6. Frequency spectrum of bandpassed FM signal. From the figure, the FM signal looks identical to original modulated FM signal.

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Fig 8. Frequency spectrum of noisy FM signal. Similar to noisy AM signal, the noise causes the jitters which can be seen by the random fluctuation in the signals amplitude. 5) Demodulating the AM and FM signals In order to see the effect of both signals, the modulated demodulated in order to get Handel.mat. Below are the demodulated signals look like: noise sensitivity for signals were then the original signal, plots of how the

The signal in Figure 9 contains more noise than signal in Figure 10. To determine the result accurately, the calculation of SNR was performed. 6) Computing the modulated signals SNR The SNR of the signals were calculated this equation (in decibel): using

SNR = 10 Log (

Psig Pnoise

(3)

demodulated bandlimited signal(AM), Frequency Spectrum 1000 900 800 700

Since the noise was generated using random number generator, this result may vary from one set of simulation to the other. Nevertheless, we should observe that FM signal has much higher SNR compared to AM signal. III. RESULTS For demodulated AM signals, the SNR was 0.2497 whilst for FM, the SNR was 0.8531. Both of these values are close to 0. This means that the power of the modulating signal is almost as equal as the noise power. As observed from the demodulated signals spectrum, the reconstruction of the signal is not perfect, due to noise. This result indicates that FM signal has higher SNR than AM signal. This means that FM signal is more robust to noise than AM IV. CONCLUSION Based on the results obtained, FM signal have a higher immunity to noise than AM signal. Since FM signal has higher SNR, it means that most of its energy is dominated by informative signal, not noise. AM, on the other hand, has much lower SNR because most of its power is used to transmit the distorted signal. Ideally, we want to transmit signal with higher power efficiency. Therefore, we can conclude that FM signal is more suitable than AM signal as a method of information transmission for high quality broadcasting.
APPENDIX

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Fig 9. Frequency spectrum of the demodulated AM signal with noise. After demodulation, the signal is fed through a low pass filter in order to get the essential bandwidth that contains the meaningful information. This signal looks almost the same as the original modulated signal but with some noise deteriorating the input signal.
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Below are the Matlab codes used for this simulation. clear all; load handel; %from this we get y and Fs m = y'; clear y; %msg signal %----increase sample----Q = 20; % USE 20 instead of 2!

Fig 10. Frequency spectrum of the demodulated FM signal with noise. Some random fluctuations can be seen on the power spectrum due to noise.

Fsamp = Q*Fs; m = interp(m, Q); fs=Fsamp; to = ((0:length(m)-1))/(fs); %------------------------Plot the original waveform (time domain) figure() plot(to,m) title('Handel all time (1-9s)'), xlabel('time(t)'),ylabel('intensity (a.u)') %Spectrum of original signal (freq domain) [M,F] = myfft(m,fs); figure,plot(F,abs(M)) title('original signal spectrum'), xlabel('freq(Hz)'),ylabel('amplitude (a.u)') %------------AM Modulation--------% %Create a carrier fc=40000; %center frequency carrier = cos(2.*pi.*fc.*to); %Modulate the signal mmf = m.*carrier; %Spectrum of the AM signal (freq domain) [Mmod,Fmod]=myfft(mmf,fs); figure() plot(Fmod,abs(Mmod)), axis tight title('modulated signal spectrum (AM)'), xlabel('freq(Hz)'),ylabel('amplitude (a.u)') %BANDPASS FILTER bfilter=firpm(30,[0.01 .1 0.2 1],[0 1 1 0]); %%30th order AMbpass = filter(bfilter, 1,mmf); %Spectrum of the signal after filtering [YAMbpass,FAMbpass] = myfft(AMbpass,fs); figure, plot(FAMbpass,abs(YAMbpass)),axis tight title('modulated signal spectrum (AM) after bandpass filter'), xlabel('freq(Hz)'),ylabel('amplitude (a.u)'); %Adding noise into the AM modulated signal noise = randn(size(AMbpass))-0.5; Pn = mean(noise.^2); Psig = mean(AMbpass.^2); noise = noise/sqrt(Pn)*sqrt(Psig); SigNoise = AMbpass+noise; bfilter4=firpm(300,[0 .4 .48 0.52 .6 1],[0 0 1 1 0 0]);

SigNoise = filter(bfilter4, 1,SigNoise); %Spectrum of the AM + Noise signal [Sn,fSn] = myfft(SigNoise,fs); figure() plot(fSn,abs(Sn)),axis tight title('modulated signal with noise spectrum (AM) after bandpass filter'), xlabel('freq(Hz)'),ylabel('amplitude (a.u)'); PAMbpass = mean(AMbpass.^2); %Demodulate the signal damm = SigNoise.*carrier; bfilter3=firpm(300,[0 .1 .15 1],[1 1 0 0]); damm = filter(bfilter3, 1,damm); %Spectrum of signal just after demodulation [AMdemod,FAMdemod]=myfft(damm,fs); figure() plot(FAMdemod, abs(AMdemod)),axis tight title('demodulated bandlimited signal(AM), Frequency Spectrum') xlabel('freq(Hz)'),ylabel('amplitude (a.u)') % calc SNR after DEMODULATE Phandel = mean(m.^2); SNRAMafterdemodulate abs(10*log10(Phandel/mean((m-damm).^2))) % % %------------FM Modulation--------% beta =1; %%change according to need freq_dev = 2*pi*1000*beta; fc=40000; %Fs = 2*fc; Fs = fs; %modulating signal using FM yfm = fmmod(m,fc,fs,freq_dev); %Spectrum of the FM signal (freq domain) [MFmod,FFmod]=myfft(yfm,fs); figure() plot(FFmod,abs(MFmod)) %, axis tight title('modulated signal spectrum (FM)'), xlabel('freq(Hz)'),ylabel('amplitude (a.u)') %BANDPASS FILTER bfilter2=firpm(30,[0.01 .1 0.2 1],[0 1 1 0]); %%30th order FMbpass = filter(bfilter2, 1,yfm); %Spectrum of the signal after filtering [YFMbpass,FFMbpass] = myfft(FMbpass,fs);

figure, plot(FFMbpass,abs(YFMbpass)),axis tight title('modulated signal spectrum (FM) after bandpass filter'), xlabel('freq(Hz)'),ylabel('amplitude (a.u)'); %Calculate power of FM after bandpass filter PFMbpass = mean(FMbpass.^2); if (PFMbpass ~= PAMbpass) FMbpass FMbpass/sqrt(PFMbpass)*sqrt(PAMbpass); end PFMbpass = mean(FMbpass.^2) PAMbpass %Adding noise into the FM modulated signal noise1 = randn(size(FMbpass))-0.5; Pn1 = mean(noise1.^2); Psig1 = mean(FMbpass.^2); noise1 = noise1/sqrt(Pn1)*sqrt(Psig1); SigNoise1 = FMbpass+noise1; bfilter4=firpm(300,[0 .4 .48 0.52 .6 1],[0 0 1 1 0 0]); SigNoise1 = filter(bfilter4, 1,SigNoise1); %Spectrum of the FM + Noise signal [Sn1,fSn1] = myfft(SigNoise1,fs); figure() plot(fSn1,abs(Sn1)), axis tight title('modulated signal with noise spectrum (FM) after bandpass filter'), xlabel('freq(Hz)'),ylabel('amplitude (a.u)');

function x = FMdemod(y,beta) [r, c] = size(y); if r*c == 0 y = []; return; end; if (r == 1) y = y(:); len = c; else len = r; end; Fc = 40000; Fs = 8162*20; pi2 = 2*pi; [num, den] = butter(5, Fc * 2 / Fs); sen = 2*pi*beta*100; %pre-process the filter. if abs(den(1)) < eps error('First denominator filter coefficient must be non-zero.'); else num = num/den(1); if (length(den) > 1) den = - den(2:length(den)) / den(1); else den = 0; end; num = num(:)'; den = den(:)'; end; len_den = length(den); len_num = length(num); x = y; y = 2 * y; ini_phase = pi/2; for ii = 1 : size(y, 2) z1 = zeros(length(den), 1); s1 = zeros(len_num, 1); intgl = 0; memo = 0; for i = 1:size(y, 1) %start with the zero-initial condition integer. vco_out = cos(pi2 * intgl+ini_phase); if len_num > 1 s1 = [y(i, ii) * vco_out; s1(1:len_num-1)];

%Demodulate the signal dfmm = FMdemod(SigNoise1,beta); bfilter3=firpm(300,[0 .275 .28 1],[1 1 0 0]); dfmm = filter(bfilter3, 1,dfmm); %Spectrum of signal just after demodulation [FMdemod,FFMdemod]=myfft(dfmm,fs); figure() plot(FFMdemod, abs(FMdemod)),axis tight title('demodulated bandlimited signal(FM), Frequency Spectrum'), xlabel('freq(Hz)'),ylabel('amplitude (a.u)') SNRFMafterdemodulate abs(10*log10(Phandel/mean((m-dfmm').^2))) FM Demod function: =

else s1 = y(i, ii); end tmp = num * s1 + den * z1; if len_den > 1 z1 = [tmp; z1(1:len_den-1)]; else z1 = tmp; end; intgl = rem(((tmp*sen + Fc)/ Fs + intgl), 1); x(i, ii) = tmp; end; end; x = x;

ACKNOWLEDGMENT Greatest appreciation to our Signal and Communication instructor, Dr. Bennett Landman for his instructions, time and patience in order to make this project successful. Also, to our teaching assistant, Wan Hasan Wan Ahmad Sanadi for his review on generating and working with AM signals.