Viet Nam National University Ho Chi Minh City

University of Science
Faculty of Electronics & Telecommunications

Chapter 1
Introduction

Dang Le Khoa
Email: [email protected]
 Chapter 1: Introduction
– Basic Block Diagram
– Digital Communications
– Typical Communication systems
– Some Basic Concepts
– Review of Signals
 1. Communication System Components
Communication systems are designed to transmit information.

• The source originates a message, such as a human voice, a

television picture, an e-mail message, or data.
• If the data is nonelectric, it must be converted by an input
transducer
 2 Digital Communications

➢ A digital communication system transfers

information from a digital source to the intended
receiver (also called the sink).
➢ An analog communication system transfers
information from an analog source to the sink.
➢ A digital waveform is defined as a function of time
that can have a discrete set of amplitude values.
➢ An Analog waveform is a function that has a
continuous range of values.
 2. Digital Communications…

Faculty of Electronics & Telecommunications. HCMUS [5]

 2. Digital Communication
➢ Advantages
• Relatively inexpensive digital circuits may be used;
• Privacy is preserved by using data encryption;
• Data from voice, video, and data sources may be merged and transmitted over a
common digital transmission system;
• In long-distance systems, noise dose not accumulate from repeater to repeater.
Data regeneration is possible
• Errors in detected data may be small, even when there is a large amount of
noise on the received signal;
• Errors may often be corrected by the use of coding.
• Disadvantages
• Generally, more bandwidth is required than that for analog systems;
• Synchronization is required.
 2. Communication System Components
Communication systems are designed to transmit information.

Source Source Channel

Modulation
input Coder Coder
transmitter

channel Distortion and noise +

Reconstructed
Signal Source Channel
demodulation
output decoder decoder

receiver
 ADC/DAC
⚫ Analog-to-Digital Conversion (ADC) and Digital-to-Analog
Conversion (DAC) are the processes that allow digital
computers to interact with these everyday signals.
⚫ Digital information is different from its continuous counterpart
in two important respects: it is sampled, and it is quantized
 Source Coder
⚫ Source coding reduces
redundancy based on the
predictability of the message
source.
⚫ The objective of source
coding is to use codes that
are as short as possible to
represent the source signal.
Shorter codes are more
efficient because they require
less time to transmit at a
given data rate.
 Channel Coding
⚫ Error correction codes add redundancy.
⚫ Because of redundancy, if certain bits are in error due to noise
or interference, other related bits may help them recover,
allowing us to decode a message accurately despite errors in the
received signal.

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 Modulation
⚫ Process of varying a carrier signal
in order to use that signal to
convey information
– Carrier signal can transmit far
away, but information cannot
– Modem: amplitude, phase, and
frequency
– Analog: AM, amplitude, FM,
frequency, Vestigial sideband
modulation, TV
– Digital: mapping digital
information to different
constellation: Frequency-shift
key (FSK)
 3. Telecommunication
⚫ Telegraph
⚫ Fixed line telephone
⚫ Cable/Wired networks
⚫ Wireless Communications
⚫ Internet
⚫ Fiber communications
 4.Bandwidth, Power, Channel,
Noise
⚫ Bandwidth: the number of bits per second is proportional to B
⚫ Transmit power
– Constrained by device, battery, health issue, etc.
⚫ Channel responses to different frequency and different time
– Satellite: almost flat over frequency, change slightly over time
– Cable or line: response very different over frequency, change slightly
over time.
– Fiber: perfect
– Wireless: worst. Multipath reflection causes fluctuation in frequency
response. Doppler shift causes fluctuation over time
⚫ Noise and interference
– AWGN: Additive White Gaussian noise
– Interferences: power line, microwave, other users (CDMA phone)
 4. Review of Signals
⚫ Data and Signals
⚫ Periodic analog signals
⚫ Digital signals

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 Analog and Digital Data
⚫ Data can be analog or digital.
– The term analog data refers to information that is continuous;
– Digital data refers to information that has discrete states.
⚫ For example:
– An analog clock that has hour, minute, and second hands gives
information in a continuous form; the movements of the hands are
continuous.
– A digital clock that reports the hours and the minutes will change
suddenly from 8:05 to 8:06.

Faculty of Electronics & Telecommunications. HCMUS [16]

Comparison of analog and digital signals

3.17
 Periodic and Nonperiodic

⚫ A periodic signal completes a pattern within a measurable

time frame, called a period, and repeats that pattern over
subsequent identical periods. The completion of one full
pattern is called a cycle.
⚫ A nonperiodic signal changes without exhibiting a pattern or
cycle that repeats over time.

3.18
 Sine Wave

The sine wave is the most fundamental form of a periodic

analog signal.

Value

•••
Time

3.19
Two signals with two different amplitudes

Peak
amplitude

Peak
amplitude

3.20
Two signals with same phase, different
amplitudes and frequency

3.21
Example

The period of a signal is 100 ms. What is its frequency in

kilohertz?.
Solution
First we change 100 ms to seconds, and then we calculate
the frequency from the period (1 Hz = 10–3 kHz).

3.22
 Phase

The term phase, or phase shift, describes the position of the

waveform relative to time 0.
If we think of the wave as something that can be shifted
backward or forward along the time axis, phase describes the
amount of that shift. It indicates the status of the first cycle.

3.23
Three sine waves with different phases

3.24
Example

A sine wave is offset 1/6 cycle with respect to time 0. What

is its phase in degrees and radians?
Solution
We know that 1 complete cycle is 360°. Therefore, 1/6 cycle
is

3.25
 Time and Frequency Domains

A sine wave is comprehensively defined by its

amplitude, frequency, and phase.
We have been showing a sine wave by using what is
called a time domain plot. The time-domain plot
shows changes in signal amplitude with respect to
time (it is an amplitude-versus-time plot).

3.26
The time and frequency-domain plots of a sine wave

3.27
Example

The frequency domain is more compact and useful when we

are dealing with more than one sine wave. For example,
Figure shows three sine waves, each with different
amplitude and frequency. All can be represented by three
spikes in the frequency domain.

3.28
 Composite Signals

Figure shows a periodic composite signal with

frequency f. We can consider it to be three alarm
systems, each with a different frequency. The analysis
of this signal can give us a good understanding of
how to decompose signals. It is very difficult to
manually decompose this signal into a series of
simple sine waves.
However, there are tools, both hardware and software,
that can help us do the job. We are not concerned
about how it is done; we are only interested in the
result. Figure shows the result of decomposing the
above signal in both the time and frequency domains.
3.29
A composite periodic signal

3.30
Figure 3.11: Decomposition of a composite periodic signal

Amplitude

•••
Time

Amplitude

f 3f 9f Frequency

b. Frequency-domain decomposition of the composite signal

3.31
Example 3.9

Figure 3.12 shows a nonperiodic composite signal. It can be

the signal created by a microphone or a telephone set when a
word or two is pronounced. In this case, the composite
signal cannot be periodic, because that implies that we are
repeating the same word or words with exactly the
same tone.

3.32
Figure 3.12: Time and frequency domain of a non-periodic signal

3.33
 Bandwidth

The range of frequencies contained in a composite

signal is its bandwidth. The bandwidth is normally a
difference between two numbers. For example, if a
composite signal contains frequencies between 1000
and 5000, its bandwidth is 5000 − 1000, or 4000.

3.34
Figure 3.13: The bandwidth of periodic and nonperiodic composite
signals

3.35
 Example 3.10

If a periodic signal is decomposed into five sine waves with

frequencies of 100, 300, 500, 700, and 900 Hz, what is its
bandwidth? Draw the spectrum, assuming all components
have a maximum amplitude of 10 V.
Solution
Let fh be the highest frequency, fl the lowest frequency, and
B the bandwidth. Then

3.36
Figure 3.14: The bandwidth for example 3.10

3.37
 Digital Signals
⚫ In addition to being represented by an analog signal, information
can also be represented by a digital signal.
⚫ A digital signal can have more than two levels. In this case, we
can send more than 1 bit for each level.

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Example 3.16

A digital signal has eight levels. How many bits are needed
per level? We calculate the number of bits from the
following formula. Each signal level is represented by 3 bits.

3.39
 Bit Rate

Most digital signals are nonperiodic, and thus period

and frequency are not appropriate characteristics.
Another term—bit rate (instead of frequency)—is
used to describe digital signals. The bit rate is the
number of bits sent in 1s, expressed in bits per
second (bps). Figure 3.17 shows the bit rate for two
signals.

3.40
Example 3.18

Assume we need to download text documents at the rate of

100 pages per second. If we assume that A page is an
average of 24 lines with 80 characters in each line and one
character requires 8 bits, What is the required bit rate of the
channel?
Solution
The bit rate is:

3.41
Example 3.19

A digitized voice channel, as we will see in Chapter 4, is

made by digitizing a 4-kHz bandwidth analog voice signal.
We need to sample the signal at twice the highest frequency
(two samples per hertz). We assume that each sample
requires 8 bits. What is the required bit rate?
Solution
The bit rate can be calculated as

3.42
Example 3.20

What is the bit rate for high-definition TV (HDTV)?

Solution
HDTV uses digital signals to broadcast high quality video
signals. The HDTV screen is normally a ratio of 16 : 9 (in
contrast to 4 : 3 for regular TV), which means the screen is
wider. There are 1920 by 1080 pixels per screen, and the
screen is renewed 30 times per second. Twenty-four bits
represents one color pixel. We can calculate the bit rate as

The TV stations reduce this rate to 20 to 40 Mbps through

compression.
3.43