Digital Communications System

Design
An Introduction
 Introduction
• This course provides the principles of digital
communication and explores techniques to
design and analyze digital communication
systems for point-to-point and point-to-
multipoint transmission and reception.
• Other than for radio broadcasting, modern
communication systems are going digital, and in
the USA the conversion of analog TV broadcasting
into digital HDTV broadcasting at the beginning of
2009 signified the coming end of analog
communications.
 A brief look backwards
• Communications between living beings began
with the voice, and the three biggest voice
systems in the world are the telephone, and
the cellular and radio broadcasting systems.
 A brief look backwards
• The dissemination of visual activities then
propelled the development of TV broadcasting
systems.
• The pioneer telephone network and radio
broadcasting systems employed analog
communication techniques, such as AM and
FM, for transmission of analog voice, as did
the analog TV broadcasting systems, which
employed VSB-AM for picture transmission.
 A brief look backwards
• The quality of the message, such as voice and
images, at the analog receiver depends on
how well the waveform that carries the
message over the physical channel (twisted-
pair telephone wires, coaxial and fiber-optic
cables, space, and water) can be reproduced.
• In addition, the fidelity of the received
message depends on the signal-to-noise ratio
at the receiver input.
 A brief look backwards
• For good analog communications, the signal-
to-noise ratio must be large, and this requires
high-power transmitters, such as are used in
AM radio and TV broadcasting.
• For FM radio broadcasting a large frequency
spectrum is used, such as 200 kHz for radio
broadcasting, which shows that analog
communications do not utilize power and
bandwidth efficiently.
 A brief look backwards
• Furthermore, the advent of the Internet
requires audio, video, imagery, and text
messages to be integrated for transmission
over a common channel and this in effect
rules out analog communications such as AM
and FM.
 A brief look backwards
• In analog communications, the message signal
requires an infinite set of continuous time
waveforms for transmission over a physical
channel.
• This is because the message itself, such as
audio or video, must first be converted into a
voltage baseband waveform with a continuous
range in amplitude that has countless possible
values.
 A brief look backwards
• When the baseband voltage waveform is used
to modulate an RF carrier for transmission,
such as in AM or FM, the modulated RF signal
transmitted over the physical channel also has
countless possible values in both its amplitude
and frequency ranges.
 A brief look backwards
• The only way to recover the message signal is
to faithfully reproduce the baseband
waveform from the modulated signal.
• This can be done easily in the case of no noise
and no equipment imperfections, but
otherwise the fidelity of the message signal
may be reduced.
 A brief look backwards
• Digital communication does not involve the
faithful reproduction of the baseband waveform
in the presence of noise and equipment
imperfections.
• Digital communication operates instead with a
finite set of continuous time modulation
waveforms for transmission over a physical
channel.
• This implies that the message signal must be
represented by a finite set of voltage baseband
waveforms.
 A brief look backwards
• Mathematically, a finite set of waveforms can
only represent a finite set of alphabets,
commonly referred to as symbols.
• A symbol consists of a fixed number of binary
digits or bits.
• For example, the set of four distinct symbols
{00, 01, 10, 11} can be represented by four
distinct waveforms .
 A brief look backwards
• The process of converting a voltage baseband
waveform that represents an audio or video
message into bits is referred to as the analog
to digital conversion (or A/D).
• Text messages generated by computers are
inherently in bits, so with A/D conversion,
audio, video, text, and imagery can all be
integrated into a single digital stream of bits.
 A brief look backwards
• The process of A/D, bit-symbol mapping,
baseband waveform shaping, and modulation
is referred to as digital transmission.
• The process of demodulating the modulated
signal, detecting the symbol, symbol–bit
mapping, and digital to analog conversion (or
D/A) is called digital reception.
 A brief look backwards
• Digital communication makes no attempts to
reproduce the finite set of voltage baseband
waveforms.
• Instead, the receiver detects the energy
content of each baseband waveform in the
presence of noise and equipment
imperfections, and then makes a best
estimate of which transmitted symbol was
received.
 A brief look backwards
• If the signal to noise ratio per symbol is
reasonably large, a symbol will most likely be
detected correctly with high probability.
• If not, a symbol error may occur. This is the
essence of digital communication.
• For a given signal-to-noise ratio, an analog
communication receiver attempts to
reproduce the voltage baseband waveform
with certain subjective fidelity.
 A brief look backwards
• On the other hand, for a given signal-to-noise
ratio per symbol, a digital communication
receiver produces symbols with a quantitative
error rate.
• It is important to know in advance the lower
bound of the signal-to-noise ratio per symbol
for a specified error rate irrespective of the
type and size of the set of modulation
waveforms.
 A brief look backwards
• In 1948 Claude Shannon established this lower
bound and also provided the channel capacity
for reliable transmission.
• Shannon’s work gives the designers of digital
communication systems the freedom to
choose the set of modulation waveforms that
achieve either the best power or bandwidth
efficiency, or a trade-off combination of both.
 A brief look backwards
• As long as the transmission rate is below the
channel capacity and the signal-to-noise ratio
per symbol is above the Shannon limit,
reliable communication is possible with an
arbitrarily small error rate.
 A brief look backwards
• Guided by the Shannon channel capacity
theorem (main theorem), the designer can
further integrate error-correction codes with
modulation techniques to lower the signal-to-
noise ratio per symbol to achieve a specified
error rate.
• The first error-correction code, the Hamming
code, was discovered by Richard W. Hamming in
1950, two years after Shannon published his
landmark work
 A brief look backwards
• Conceptual block diagram of a digital
communication system.