A New Family of Nyquist Pulses With Improved Performance

In this work, we introduce and evaluate the performance of a novel family of Nyquist (intersymbol interference free) pulses that outperform several existing ones available in the open technical literature. The proposed pulse design is based on a polynomial interpolation approach, which - to the best of our knowledge - is applied for the first time for a Nyquist pulse. In particular, we propose a geometrical approach in conjunction with the use of cubic spline functions for the construction of the transfer function of the considered pulses. The proposed methodology is quite flexible, as it allows for the efficient design of Nyquist pulses with improved performance, even after the choice of the roll-off factor. Four members of the proposed family of pulses are studied in detail in terms of their frequency and time domain response, the eye diagram and the achieved bit error rate. The proposed theoretical analysis is corroborated by extensive numerically evaluated results. Our results have shown that for given values of the roll-off factor, the timing jitter and the signal to noise ratio, certain members of the proposed family can achieve a lower bit error rate as compared to several state-of-the-art pulses.