Digital Communication

Module 1
 Syllabus

• Analog Pulse Modulation: Sampling theorem for band-pass signals, Pulse Amplitude modulation: generation and
demodulation, PAM/TDM system, PPM generation an demodulation, PWM, Spectra of Pulse modulated signals, SNR
calculations for pulse modulation systems.
 Text/ Reference Books:
• Simon Haykin; "Communication Systems" John Wiley & Sons.

• B.P. Lathi; "Modern Digital and Analog Communication", 3rd Edition Oxford University Press.

• Sklar; "Digital Communication", 2E Pearson Education.

• K.SamShanmugham; "Digital and Analog Communication Systems"John Wiley & Sons

• R.E. Ziemer and W.H. Tranter; "Principles of Communications" JAICO Publishing House.

• H.Taub and Schilling; "Principles of Communication Systems" TMH.

Block Diagram of Communication System
Block Diagram of Communication System
 Primary Communication Resources
• Transmitted Power

• Channel Bandwidth
 Information Source

• Speech, music, computer data – 1 dimensional

• Pictures – 2 dimensional
• Video – 3 dimensional
• Volume – 4 dimensional
 Modulation
Modulation is the process of changing the characteristics of carrier signal in accordance with the

instantaneous amplitude of the message signal.

 Need for Modulation
• Increase the range of communication

• Multiplexing of signals

• Avoid mixing of signals

• Wireless communication made possible

• Reduce the height of the antenna

• Improves the quality of reception

 Need for Modulation
• Increase the range of communication
 Need for Modulation
• Multiplexing of signals
 Need for Modulation
• Avoid mixing of signals
 Need for Modulation
• Wireless communication made possible
 Need for Modulation
• Reduce the height of the antenna
For the transmission of radio signals, the antenna height must be multiple of λ/4 , where λ is the
wavelength.
 Need for Modulation
• Improves the quality of reception
Modulation

Digital Modulation

ASK FSK PSK

What is digital communication?
 What is digital communication?
• The information to be processed is represented by a sequence of discrete
messages.
• Message signal is digital in nature.
What is Digital?
 What is Digital?
Information is represented in terms of discrete number of levels
 Why Digital Communication
1. Digital signals can be regenerated easily

• Less distortion and interference

• Can be recovered
• Low error rates
• High fidelity
 Why Digital Communication
• More Reliable
• Low cost digital circuits

• Flexible digital hardware implementation

• Low error rates

• High fidelity

• Multiplexing of digital signals is simpler

• Enables processing of digital signals

 Disadvantages of Digital Communication
• Non-graceful degradation of performance
Analog Communication Vs Digital Communication
Block Diagram of Digital Communication System
 Line Coding Techniques
• Line code is the code used for data transmission of a digital signal over a transmission
line.

• This process of coding is chosen so as to avoid overlap and distortion of signal such as
inter-symbol interference
 Properties of Line Coding
• As the coding is done to make more bits transmit on a single signal, the bandwidth used is
much reduced.

• For a given bandwidth, the power is efficiently used.

• The probability of error is much reduced.

• Error detection is done and the bipolar too has a correction capability.

• Power density is much favorable.

• The timing content is adequate.

• Long strings of 1s and 0s is avoided to maintain transparency.

 Types of Line Coding
• Unipolar

• Polar

• Bi-polar
 Unipolar Signaling

• Unipolar signaling is also called as On-Off Keying or simply OOK.

• The presence of pulse represents a 1 and the absence of pulse represents a 0.

• Types
• Non Return to Zero (NRZ)

• Return to Zero (RZ)

 Unipolar Non Return to Zero
• A High in data is represented by a positive pulse called as Mark, which has a
duration T0 equal to the symbol bit duration.

• A Low in data input has no pulse.

 Unipolar Non Return to Zero
Advantages:
• Simple
• Less bandwidth
Disadvantages:

• No error correction done.

• Presence of low frequency components may cause the signal droop.

• No clock is present.

• Loss of synchronization is likely to occur (especially for long strings of 1s and 0s).
 Unipolar Return to Zero
• High is represented by a positive pulse for half the bit duration (Returns to zero level in
the middle of the bit duration).

• Low is represented by absence of pulse

 Unipolar Return to Zero
• Advantages:

• Simple
• Spectral line present at the symbol rate can be used as a clock.

• Disadvantages:
• No error correction.

• Occupies twice the bandwidth as unipolar NRZ.

• The signal droop is caused at the places where signal is non-zero at 0 Hz.
 Polar NRZ Signalling
• High is represented by a positive pulse • Advantages
• Simple.
• Low is represented by a negative pulse
• No low-frequency components are present
• Disadvantages
• No error correction.

• No clock is present.

• The signal droop is caused at the places

where the signal is non-zero at 0 Hz.
 Polar RZ Signalling
• High is represented by a positive pulse of • Advantages
half bit duration • Simple.
• No low-frequency components are
• Low is represented by a negative pulse of present
half bit duration • Disadvantages
• No error correction.
• No clock is present.
• Occupies twice the bandwidth of Polar
NRZ.
• The signal droop is caused at places
where the signal is non-zero at 0 Hz.
 Bipolar Signalling
• This encoding technique has three voltage levels namely +, - and 0.

• Also called as duo-binary signalling.

 Bipolar Signalling
Advantages:
• It is simple.

• No low-frequency components are present.

• Occupies low bandwidth than unipolar and polar NRZ schemes.

• This technique is suitable for transmission over AC coupled lines, as signal drooping doesn’t occur
here.

• A single error detection capability is present in this.

Disadvantages:
• No clock is present.

• Long strings of data causes loss of synchronization.

Manchester Coding
Bi phase Coding
Spectrum of a Pulse
 Analog and Digital Signals
• Analog Signal: A continuous signal for which • Digital Signal: A signal that represents
the time varying feature of the signal is a data as a sequence of discrete values; at any
representation of some other time-varying quantity given time it can only take on one of a finite
i.e., analogous to another time varying signal. number of values.
Analog to Digital Conversion
Sampling
 Need for analog to digital conversion
• Everything in the physical world is an analog signal
• Sound, light, temperature, pressure
• Need to convert into electrical signals
• Transducers: converts one type of energy to another
• Electro-mechanical, Photonic, Electrical, …
• Examples
• Microphone/speaker
• Thermocouples
• Accelerometers

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 Going from analog to digital

• What we want…
Physical Engineering
Phenomena Units

• How we get there?

Physical Voltage or ADC Counts Engineering

Phenomena Current Units

Sensor ADC Software

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 Representing an analog signal digitally
• How do we represent an analog signal (e.g. continuous voltage)?
• As a time series of discrete values
→ On MCU: read ADC data register (counts) periodically (Ts)

f (x) Counts
Voltage (discrete)
(continuous)

f sampled (x)
t
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TS
 Sampling Theorem
• A bandlimited signal having no spectral components greater than fm Hz can be
determined uniquely by values sampled at uniform intervals of
1
𝑇𝑠 ≤ sec
2𝑓𝑚
𝑓𝑠 ≥ 2𝑓𝑚

Sampling Rate / Nyquist Criterion: 𝑓𝑠 = 2𝑓𝑚

Nyquist Criterion: Theoretically sufficient condition to allow an analog signal to be

reconstructed completely from a set of uniformly spaced discrete-time samples.
 Under Sampling
Under sampling
• Sampling rate is less than Nyquist rate
• It is impossible to reconstruct the original signal from the sampled signal.
Impulse Sampling
By sifting property of the impulse function,

=
(by convolution property)

Where,
Impulse Sampling
Impulse Sampling
Natural Sampling

Using Frequency translation property,

Natural Sampling
 Aliasing Effect
• Aliasing effect is a phenomenon that occurs when a continuous signal is sampled at a frequency that is too
low to accurately represent the original signal.
• Also known as aliasing distortion or simply aliasing
Aliasing Effect - Elimination
 Corrective Measures for Aliasing
1. Prior to sampling, a low-pass anti-aliasing filter is used to attenuate
those high- frequency components of the signal that are not essential
to the information being conveyed by the signal.

2. The filtered signal is sampled at a rate slightly higher than the

Nyquist rate.
 Pulse Modulation
• A type of modulation in which the signal is transmitted in the form of pulses.

• Information is conveyed by modulating some parameter of a series of regularly recurrent

pulses, such as the amplitude, duration, time of occurrence, or shape of the pulse.

• This modulation technique is based on the "sampling principle," allowing the recovery of
a continuous message waveform from a set of discrete instantaneous samples.
 Pulse Amplitude Modulation
• Amplitudes of the regularly spaced pulses are varied in proportion to the
corresponding sample of a continuous message signal.
 Types of Sampling
• Instantaneous Sampling

• Natural Sampling

• Flat Top Sampling

 Flat Top Sampling
Sample and Hold
1. Instantaneous sampling of the message signal m(t) every T_{s} seconds,
1
where the sampling rate 𝑓𝑠 = is chosen in accordance with the sampling
𝑇𝑠
theorem.
2. Lengthening the duration of each sample so obtained to some constant
value T.
PAM Generation and Demodulation – Natural
Sampling
PAM Generation and Demodulation – Flat Top
Sampling
 Pulse Time Modulation
• Pulse-duration modulation (PDM):
• Amplitude of the message signal are used to vary the duration of the individual pulses
in the carrier

• also referred to as pulse-width modulation (PWM)

• Pulse-position modulation (PPM):

• The position of a pulse relative to its un- modulated time of occurrence is varied in
accordance with the message signal.
Line Coding Techniques
 PWM Vs PPM
• In PWM, long pulses expend considerable power while bearing no additional information. If this unused

power is subtracted from PDM so that only time transitions are preserved, we obtain PPM. Accordingly,

PPM is a more efficient form of pulse modulation than PWM.

• Since in a PPM system the transmitted information is contained in the relative positions of the modulated

pulses, the presence of additive noise affects the performance of such a system by falsifying the time at

which the modulated pulses are judged to occur. Immunity to noise can be established by making the pulse

build up so rapidly that the time interval during which noise can exert any perturbation is very short.
 Bandwidth – Noise Tradeoff
• PPM system is the optimum form of analog pulse modulation.

• PPM and frequency modulation (FM) systems exhibit a similar noise

performance.
1. Both systems have a figure of merit proportional to the square of the transmission
bandwidth normalized with respect to the message bandwidth.

2. Both systems exhibit a threshold effect as the signal-to-noise ratio is reduced.

 Time Division Multiplexing
• An important feature of the sampling process is a conservation of time through time division
multiplexing.

• Transmission of the message samples engages the communication channel for only a fraction of the
sampling interval on a periodic basis, and in this way some of the time interval between adjacent samples
is cleared for use by other independent message sources on a time-shared basis.

• TDM enables the joint utilization of a common communication channel by a plurality of independent
message sources without mutual interference among them.
Time Division Multiplexing
 Time Division Multiplexing
• Each input message signal is first restricted in bandwidth by a low-pass anti-aliasing filter to
remove the frequencies that are nonessential to an adequate signal representation.

• The low-pass filter outputs are then applied to a commutator, which is usually implemented
using electronic switching circuitry.
(1) to take a narrow sample of each of the N input messages at a rate f, that is slightly higher than 2W, where W is the
cutoff frequency of the anti-aliasing filter,

(2) to sequentially interleave these N samples inside the sampling interval T.

• The multiplexed signal is applied to a pulse modulator, the purpose of which is to transform the
multiplexed signal into a form suitable for transmission over the common channel.
 Time Division Multiplexing
• TDM introduces a bandwidth expansion factor N, because the scheme must squeeze N samples
derived from N independent message sources into a time slot equal to one sampling interval.

• At the receiving end of the system, the received signal is applied to a pulse demodulator, which
performs the reverse operation of the pulse modulator.

• The narrow samples produced at the pulse demodulator output are distributed to the
appropriate low-pass reconstruction filters by means of a decommutator, which operates in
synchronism with the commutator in the transmitter.

• This synchronization is essential for a satisfactory operation of the system. The way this
synchronization is implemented depends naturally on the method of pulse modulation used to
transmit the multiplexed sequence of samples.