ECE8: MODULATION AND CODING TECHNIQUES

Introduction to
DIGITAL COMMUNICATION SYSTEMS
A General Communication System
What is Digital Communications?
 The Latin root word digitus means “finger” and English
borrowed from this to mean “number”.
 Communication is the transfer of information from one
place to another.
 Digital communication systems, are communication
systems that use such a digital sequence as an
interface between the source and the channel unit
(and similarly between the channel output and final
destination)
 Digital communications include systems where
relatively high-frequency analog carriers are
modulated by relatively low-frequency digital
information signals (digital radio) and systems
involving digital pulses (digital transmission)
transmission.
 Digital transmission systems transport information in
digital form and, therefore, require a physical facility
between the transmitter and receiver, such as a metallic
wire pair, a coaxial cable, or an optical fiber cable.
What is Digital Communications?
Advantages of Digital
Communications
Error correction/detection
Better encryption algorithms
More reliable data processing
Reduced cost
Easier data multiplexing
Facilitate data compression
Advantages of Digital
Communications
 Design efficiency: Digital is inherently more efficient
than analog in exchanging power for bandwidth, the
two premium resources in communications. Since an
essentially unlimited range of signal conditioning and
processing options are available to the designer,
effective trade-offs among power, bandwidth,
performance, and complexity can be more readily
accommodated. For any required performance,
there is a three-way trade-off among power,
bandwidth, and complexity (i.e., an increase in one
means the other two will be reduced).
 Advantages of Digital
Communications
 Versatile hardware: The processing power of digital
integrated circuits continues to approximately double
every 18 months to 2 years. These programmable
processors easily allow the implementation of
improved designs or changed requirements. Digital
circuits are generally less sensitive to physical effects,
such as vibration, aging components, and external
temperature. They also allow a greater dynamic
range (the difference between the largest and the
smallest signal values). Processing is now less costly
than precious bandwidth and power resources. This in
turn allows considerable flexibility in designing
communication systems.
 Advantages of Digital
Communications
 New and enhanced services: In today’s widely
distributed way of life, Internet services, such as web
browsing, e-mailing, texting, e-commerce, streaming
and interactive multimedia services, have all become
feasible and some even indispensable. It is also easier
to integrate different services, with various modalities,
into the same transmission scheme or to enhance
services through transmission of some additional
information, such as playing music or receiving a
phone call with all relevant details.
 Advantages of Digital
Communications
 Control of quality: A desired distortion level can be
initially set and then kept nearly fixed at that value at
every step (link) of a digital communication path. This
reconstruction of the digital signal is done by
appropriately-spaced regenerative repeaters, which do
not allow accumulation of noise and interference. On
the other hand, once the analog signal is distorted, the
distortion cannot be removed and a repeater in an
analog system (i.e., an amplifier) regenerates the
distortion together with the signal. In a way, in an analog
system, the noises add, whereas in a digital system, the
bit error rates add. In other words, with many
regenerative repeaters along the path, the impact in an
analog system is a reduction of many decibels (dBs) in
the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR), whereas the effect in a
digital system is a reduction of only a few dBs in the SNR.
 Advantages of Digital
Communications
 Improved security: Digital encryption, unlike analog
encryption, can make the transmitted information
virtually impossible to decipher. This applies especially
to sensitive data, such as electronic banking and
medical information transfer. Secure communications
can be achieved using complex cryptographic
systems
 Advantages of Digital
Communications
 Flexibility, compatibility, and switching: Combining
various digital signals and digitized analog signals from
different users and applications into streams of different
speeds and sizes—along with control and signaling
information—can be much easier and more efficient.
Signal storage, reproduction, interface with computers,
as well as access and search of information in electronic
databases can also be quite easy and inexpensive.
Digital techniques allow the development of
communication components with various features that
can easily interface with a different component
produced by a different manufacturer. Digital
transmission brings about the great ability to dynamically
switch and route messages of various types, thus offering
an array of network connectivities, including unicast,
multicast, narrowcast, and broadcast.
Disadvantages of Digital
Communications
 Signal-processing intensive: Digital
communication systems require a very high
degree of signal processing, where every
one of the three major functions of source
coding, channel coding, and modulation in
the transceiver—each requiring an array of
sub-functions (especially in the receiver)—
warrants high computational load and thus
complexity. However, Due to major
advances in digital signal processing (DSP)
technologies in the past two decades, this is
no longer a major disadvantage.
Disadvantages of Digital
Communications
 Additional bandwidth: Digital
communication systems generally require
more bandwidth than analog systems, unless
digital signal compression (source coding)
and M-ary (vis-a`-vis binary) signaling
techniques are heavily employed. Due to
major advances in compression techniques
and bandwidth-efficient modulation
schemes, the bit rate requirement and thus
the corresponding bandwidth requirement
can be considerably reduced by a couple
of orders of magnitude. As such, additional
bandwidth is no longer a critical issue.
Disadvantages of Digital
Communications
 Synchronization: Digital communication
systems always require a significant share of
resources allocated to synchronization,
including carrier phase and frequency
recovery, timing (bit or symbol) recovery,
and frame and network synchronization. This
inherent drawback of digital transmission
cannot be circumvented. However,
synchronization in a digital communication
system can be accomplished to the extent
required, but at the expense of a high
degree of complexity.
Disadvantages of Digital
Communications
 Non-graceful performance degradation:
Digital communication systems yield non-
graceful performance degradation when
the SNR drops below a certain threshold. A
modest reduction in SNR can give rise to a
considerable increase in bit error rate (BER),
thus resulting in a significant degradation in
performance.
 Classification of Signals
 Periodic and non-periodic signals

 Analog and digital signals

Classification of Signals
 The term analog signal refers to signal that is
continuous and takes continuous value. Analog
signals have infinitely many levels of intensity over a
period of time. Most phenomena in the world today
are analog. There is an infinite amount of colors to
paint an object, it is possible for us to hear different
sounds and also smell different odors. The common
theme among all these analog signals is their infinite
possibilities.
 A digital signal, on the hand, can have only a limited
number of defined values. The signal must have a
finite set of possible values, the number of set which
can be anywhere between two and very large
number that is not infinity. Although each value can
have any number, it is often as simple as 1 and 0.
Classification of Signals
 Periodic and Non Periodic Signals are types of
Analog Signals that can also be positive or
negative.
 In data communications:
 a periodic signal is a type of signal that
reiterates itself after a definite gap time.
 the non periodic or often called as aperiodic
signal is a type of signal that does not
reiterates itself. number that is not infinity.
Although each value ca
Classification of Signals
 Deterministic and random signals
 Deterministic signal: No uncertainty with respect to
the signal value at any time.
 A song played by the music player
 Random signal: Some degree of uncertainty in
signal values before it actually occurs.
 Thermal noise in electronic circuits due to the
random movement of electrons
 Number of card passing on the road in front of the
college per hour.
 Block Diagram of a Digital
Communication Systems

Block diagrams: (a) a communication system

and (b) a digital communication system
Block diagram of a Digital
Communication Systems
 In Figure a, the information source produces its output,
which is in probabilistic form, as there is no need to
convey deterministic source outputs.
 An input transducer, such as a microphone, converts the
source output into a time-varying electrical signal,
referred to as the message signal.
 The transmitter then converts the message signal into a
form suitable for transmission through a physical channel,
such as a cable. The transmitter generally changes the
characteristics of the message signal to match the
characteristics of the channel by using a process called
modulation. In addition to modulation, other functions,
such as filtering and amplification, are also performed by
the transmitter.
Block diagram of a Digital
Communication Systems
 The communication channel is the physical medium
between the transmitter and the receiver, where they
are physically separated. No communication channel is
ideal, and thus a message signal undergoes various
forms of degradation. Sources of degradation may
include attenuation, noise, distortion, and interference.
As some or all of these degradations are present in a
physical channel, a paramount goal in the design of a
communication system is to overcome the effects of
such impairments.
Block diagram of a Digital
Communication Systems
 The function of the receiver is to extract the message
signal from the received signal. The primary function is to
perform the process of demodulation, along with a
number of peripheral functions, such as amplification
and filtering. The complexity of a receiver is generally
more significant than that of the transmitter, as a receiver
must additionally minimize the effects of the channel
degradations.
 The output transducer, such as a loudspeaker, then
converts the receiver output into a signal suitable for the
information sink.
 Block Diagram of a Digital
Communication Systems

Block diagrams: (a) a communication system

and (b) a digital communication system
Block Diagram of a Digital
Communication Systems
 Figure b shows the basic functional elements of a digital
communication system. In a simple, yet classical fashion,
the transmitter or the receiver each is subdivided into
three blocks.
 The transmitter consists of the source encoder, channel
encoder, and modulator
 the receiver consists of the demodulator, channel
decoder, and source decoder. At the receiver, the
received signal passes through the inverse of the
operations at the transmitter, while minimizing the effects
of the channel impairments.
 The three functions of source coding, channel coding,
and modulation may be designed in concert with one
another to better meet the system design goals, yet
accommodating the overall system design constraints.
Block Diagram of a Digital
Communication Systems
 The information may be inherently digital, such as
computer data, or analog, such as voice.
 If the information is in analog form, then the source
encoder at the transmitter must first perform analog-to-
digital conversion to produce a binary stream, and the
source decoder must then perform digital-to-analog
conversion to recover the analog signal.
 The source encoder removes redundant information
from the binary stream so as to make efficient use of the
channel.
 Source coding, also known as data compression, leads
to bandwidth conservation, as the spectrum is always at
a premium.
Block Diagram of a Digital
Communication Systems
 The channel encoder at the transmitter introduces, in a
controlled fashion, redundancy. The additional bits are
used by the channel decoder at the receiver to
overcome the channel-induced errors. The added
redundancy serves to enhance the performance by
reducing the bit error rate, which is the ultimate
performance measure in a digital communication
system.
 The important parameters associated with channel
coding are primarily the efficiency of the coder (i.e., the
ratio of data rate at the input of the encoder to the
data rate at its output), error control capability, and the
encoder/decoder complexity.
Block Diagram of a Digital
Communication Systems
 The modulator at the transmitter and the demodulator
at the receiver serve as the interface to the
communication channel.
 The modulator accepts a sequence of bits, and maps
each sequence into a waveform. A sequence may
consist of only one or several bits.
 At the receiver, the demodulator processes the received
waveforms, and maps each to the corresponding bit
sequence. The important parameters of modulation are
the number of bits in a sequence represented by a
waveform, the types of waveforms used, the duration of
the waveforms, the power level and the bandwidth
used, as well as the demodulation complexity
Baseband and broadband
transmission

 Baseband Transmission means sending a digital signal

over a channel without changing the digital signal to
analog signal.
 Broadband Transmission (Using Modulation) means
changing the digital signals to an analog signal for
transmission.
Digital Communication Design
Aspects

 In a communication system, whether analog or digital,

there are two primary resources: transmitted power and
channel bandwidth. The transmitted power is the
average power of the transmitted signal. The channel
bandwidth reflects the band of significant frequency
components allocated for the transmission of the input
(message) signal. One of these two resources may be
more precious than the other; hence communication
channels are generally classified as bandlimited, such as
the plain old telephone system (POTS), or power-limited,
such as optical fiber links and satellite channels. Each of
these two premium resources can have a very
significant bearing on many system aspects.
Digital Communication Design
Aspects

 The digital communication design objectives are many,

but not all of equal importance; some are required and
some are desirable. Some are more difficult than others
to achieve, so further resources and additional
complexities are needed to accommodate them.
 It is virtually impossible to achieve all digital
communication design objectives simultaneously,
because they are all inherently inter-related and in fact
some are clearly in conflict with other design
imperatives, so difficult trade-offs must be made. For
instance, high-speed transmission is in conflict with low
channel bandwidth, and low bit error rate is in conflict
with low transmit power.
Digital Communication Design
Aspects

 There are some unyielding design constraints that

necessitate the trading off of any one system
requirement with each of the others. Some constraints
must be satisfied, such as those dictated by theorems in
communication theory or required by governments, and
some are desirable, such as those required by the users.
 The design of digital communication systems and
networks thus presents many challenges, as it is a
multidimensional, nonlinear, constrained optimization
problem. It is imperative to emphasize that there are
many system variables and parameters representing a
multitude of constraints, some of which cannot be easily
quantified and directly factored into a design, and there
are a host of conflicting design objectives that all need
to be fully met, and only some, but not all, can be
accommodated.
Digital communication design
objectives and constraints