ABSTRACT
This chapter describes a method of pulse shaping or, more specifically, of generating low-complexity, spectrally efficient pulses for digital communications. In digital communications, the data transmission is performed, in the most basic pulse amplitude modulation scenario, by creating a train of identical pulses and multiplying each pulse by a number representing a symbol of an information-bearing sequence to be transmitted. An ideal situation would be if one were allowed to increase the power of the pulse used for data transmission as well as its bandwidth as much as one desires to achieve the required data rate. Designing bandwidth-efficient pulses is an important problem, particularly in wireless applications where the bandwidth occupancy affects the total number of users in the spectral window allocated for a given service provider. The phi-pulse provides an optimum for the bandwidth occupancy criterion on a subclass of pulses generated by passing a unit area impulse through a sequence of sliding adders.
