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Transmission: 1 Analog Vs Digital Transmission

Digital transmission has advantages over analog transmission when transmitting signals over long distances with repeaters. [1] In digital transmission, the signal is quantized into integer values and repeaters can virtually eliminate noise by thresholding, whereas in analog transmission the noise is amplified at each repeater. [2] The document simulates transmitting an audio signal digitally and analogly over 70 repeaters, showing the digital signal maintains its original 17 dB SNR while the analog signal drops to 8.7 dB SNR. [3] However, with very high noise, digital transmission also degrades while analog transmission retains higher quality.

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Vishal Tank
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61 views5 pages

Transmission: 1 Analog Vs Digital Transmission

Digital transmission has advantages over analog transmission when transmitting signals over long distances with repeaters. [1] In digital transmission, the signal is quantized into integer values and repeaters can virtually eliminate noise by thresholding, whereas in analog transmission the noise is amplified at each repeater. [2] The document simulates transmitting an audio signal digitally and analogly over 70 repeaters, showing the digital signal maintains its original 17 dB SNR while the analog signal drops to 8.7 dB SNR. [3] However, with very high noise, digital transmission also degrades while analog transmission retains higher quality.

Uploaded by

Vishal Tank
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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Download as PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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transmission

December 22, 2017

1 Analog vs Digital Transmission


In this notebook we will explore the potential advantages of digital transmission over analog
transmission. We will consider the case of transmission over a long (e.g. transoceanic) cable in
which several repeaters are used to compensate for the attenuation introduced by the transmis-
sion.
Remember that if each cable segment introduces an attenuation of 1/G, we can recover the
original amplitude by boosting the signal with a repeater with gain G. However, if the signal has
accumulated additive noise, the noise will be amplified as well so that, after N repeaters, the noise
will have been amplified N times:

x̂N (t) = x(t) + N Gσ(t)


If we use a digital signal, on the other hand, we can threshold the signal after each repeater
and virtually eliminate the noise at each stage, so that even after several repeaters the trasmission
is still noise-free.
Let’s start with the standard initial bookkeeping. . .

In [1]: %matplotlib inline


import matplotlib
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
import numpy as np
import IPython
from scipy.io import wavfile

Now we can read in an audio file from disk; we can plot it and play it back. The
wavfile.read() function returns the audio data and the playback rate, which we will need
to pass to the playback functions.

In [2]: rate, s = wavfile.read('speech.wav')


plt.plot(s);
IPython.display.Audio(s, rate=rate)

Out[2]: <IPython.lib.display.Audio object>

1
1.1 The “Analog” and “Digital” Signals
We will now create two version of the audio signal, an “analog” version and a “digital” version.
Obviously the analog version is just a simulation, since we’re using a digital computer; we will
assume that, by using floating point values, we’re in fact close enough to infinite precision. In the
digital version of the signal, on the other hand, the audio samples will only take integer values
between -100 and +100 (i.e. we will use approximately 8 bits per audio sample).

In [3]: # the analog signal is simply rescaled between -100 and +100
# largest element in magnitude:
norm = 1.0 / max(np.absolute([min(s), max(s)]))
sA = 100.0 * s * norm

# the digital version is clamped to the integers


sD = np.round(sA)

Remmeber that there is no free lunch and quantization implies a loss of quality; this initial loss
(that we can minimize by using more bits per sample) is the price to pay for digital transmission.
We can plot the error and compute the Signal to Noise Ratio (SNR) of the quantized signal

In [4]: plt.plot(sA-sD);

2
as expected, the error is between -0.5 and +0.5, since in the “analog” signal the values are
real-valued, whereas in the “digital” version they can only take integer values. As for the SNR,

In [5]: # we will be computing SNRs later as well, so let's define a function


def SNR(noisy, original):
# power of the error
err = np.linalg.norm(original-noisy)
# power of the signal
sig = np.linalg.norm(original)
# SNR in dBs
return 10 * np.log10(sig/err)

print ('SNR = %f dB' % SNR(sD, sA))

SNR = 17.124344 dB

Can we hear the 17dB difference? A bit. . .

In [6]: IPython.display.Audio(sA, rate=rate)

Out[6]: <IPython.lib.display.Audio object>

In [7]: IPython.display.Audio(sD, rate=rate)

Out[7]: <IPython.lib.display.Audio object>

3
1.2 Transmission
Let’s now define a function that represents the net effect of transmitting audio over a cable seg-
ment terminated by a repeater: * the signal is attenuated * the signal is accumulates additive noise
as it propagates through the cable * the signal is amplified to the original amplitude by the repeater

In [8]: def repeater(x, noise_amplitude, attenuation):


# first, create the noise
noise = np.random.uniform(-noise_amplitude, noise_amplitude, len(x))
# attenuation
x = x * attenuation
# noise
x = x + noise
# gain compensation
return x / attenuation

we can use the repeater for both analog and digital signals. Transmission of the analog signal
is simply a sequence of repeaters:

In [9]: def analog_tx(x, num_repeaters, noise_amplitude, attenuation):


for n in range(0, num_repeaters):
x = repeater(x, noise_amplitude, attenuation)
return x

For digital signals, however, we can rectify the signal after each repeater, because we know
that values should only be integer-valued:

In [10]: def digital_tx(x, num_repeaters, noise_amplitude, attenuation):


for n in range(0, num_repeaters):
x = np.round(repeater(x, noise_amplitude, attenuation))
return x

Let’s compare transmission schemes

In [11]: NUM_REPEATERS = 70
NOISE_AMPLITUDE = 0.2
ATTENUATION = 0.5

yA = analog_tx(sA, NUM_REPEATERS, NOISE_AMPLITUDE, ATTENUATION)


print ('Analog trasmission: SNR = %f dB' % SNR(yA, sA))

yD = digital_tx(sD, NUM_REPEATERS, NOISE_AMPLITUDE, ATTENUATION)


print ('Digital trasmission: SNR = %f dB' % SNR(yD, sA))

Analog trasmission: SNR = 8.715545 dB


Digital trasmission: SNR = 17.124344 dB

As you can see, the SNR after digital transmission has not changed! Now the difference be-
tween audio clips should be easy to hear:

4
In [12]: IPython.display.Audio(yA, rate=rate)

Out[12]: <IPython.lib.display.Audio object>

In [13]: IPython.display.Audio(yD, rate=rate)

Out[13]: <IPython.lib.display.Audio object>

Note however that, if the noise amplitude exceeds a certain value, digital transmission de-
grades even less gracefully than analog transmission:

In [15]: NOISE_AMPLITUDE = 0.3

yA = analog_tx(sA, NUM_REPEATERS, NOISE_AMPLITUDE, ATTENUATION)


print ('Analog trasmission: SNR = %f dB' % SNR(yA, sA))

yD = digital_tx(sD, NUM_REPEATERS, NOISE_AMPLITUDE, ATTENUATION)


print ('Digital trasmission: SNR = %f dB' % SNR(yD, sA))

Analog trasmission: SNR = 6.974314 dB


Digital trasmission: SNR = 6.264267 dB

In [ ]:

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