Communications Blockset Release Notes

Chapter 3
Communications Blockset 2.0 Release Notes

New Features

The Communications Blockset is a new product being introduced with Release 12. The Communications Blockset incorporates the functionality of the blocks that were included in the Communications Toolbox 1.4 (Release 11), with the addition of the new features summarized below.

Note    The Communications Toolbox is described in a separate section.

Digital Modulation Libraries

The digital modulation libraries have been replaced with new ones. The new libraries contain baseband and passband sublibraries for:

• Amplitude modulation (PAM, QAM)
• Phase modulation (PSK, DPSK)
• Frequency modulation (FSK)
• Continuous phase modulation (CPM), including MSK and GMSK

For a list of blocks, see the reference sections for the baseband and passband digital modulation libraries. For a discussion of the capabilities of the new libraries, see Digital Modulation in the Communications Blockset User's Guide.

Interleaving Libraries

A new Interleaving library contains sublibraries for block interleaving and convolutional interleaving. These sublibraries support general block interleavers and general multiplexed interleavers, as well as several special cases of these. For more information, see Interleaving in the Communications Blockset User's Guide.

Fading Channels

The new Multipath Rayleigh Fading Channel and Rician Fading Channel blocks implement baseband simulations of fading propagation channels. These blocks model real-world mobile communication effects and are useful for modeling mobile wireless communication systems. For more information, see Fading Channels in the Communications Blockset User's Guide.

Enhanced Support for Convolutional Coding

The new APP Decoder block implements a posteriori probability decoding. The enhanced Convolutional Encoder and Viterbi Decoder blocks now support a more general class of convolutional codes by accepting a trellis parameter in their dialog boxes. The new poly2trellis function in the Communications Toolbox supports this enhancement, by converting a polynomial description of an encoder into a corresponding trellis description. For more information, see Convolutional Coding in the Communications Blockset User's Guide.

Sequence Operations

These new blocks in the Sequence Operations library manipulate data sequences in various ways:

• Bit to Integer Converter and Integer to Bit Converter convert between integers and their binary representations.
• Complex Phase Shift and Complex Phase Difference manipulate or analyze the phase of a complex signal.
• Derepeat is an inverse of the DSP Blockset's Repeat block.
• Interlacer and Deinterlacer can be useful for combining or separating in-phase and quadrature components of a signal.
• Puncture and Insert Zero are useful for processing punctured codes.

Major Bug Fixes

The Communications Blockset includes several bug fixes, including descriptions (online only) of particularly important bug fixes.

Known Software Problems

Upgrading from an Earlier Release