DATA

COMMUNICATIONS
Lecture - 1
Introduction
• Data communications are the exchange of data between two devices via some form of
transmission medium such as a wire cable.
• For data communications to occur, the communicating devices must be part of a
communication system made up of a com­bination of hardware (physical equipment) and
software (programs).
• The effectiveness of a data communications system depends on four fundamental
characteristics:
1. delivery
2. accuracy
3. timeliness and
4. jitter
Characteristics of Data Communication
1. Delivery: The system must deliver data to the correct destination. Data must be
received by the intended device or user and only by that device or user.
2. Accuracy: The system must deliver the data accurately. Data that have been altered
in transmission and left uncorrected are unusable.
3. Timeliness: The system must deliver data in a timely manner. Data delivered late
are useless. In the case of video and audio, timely delivery means delivering data as
they are produced, in the same order that they are produced, and without signifi­cant
delay. This kind of delivery is called real-time transmission.
4. Jitter: Jitter refers to the variation in the packet arrival time. It is the uneven delay in
the delivery of audio or video packets. For example, let us assume that video packets
are sent every 3D ms. If some of the packets arrive with 3D-ms delay and others with
4D-ms delay, an uneven quality in the video is the result.
Key Elements of Data Communication
• Source: Generates (binary) data to be transmitted. examples are telephones and personal
computers.
• Transmitter: Converts data into transmittable electromagnetic signals. For example, a
modem takes a digital bit stream from an attached device such as a personal computer
and transforms that bit stream into an analog signal that can be handled by the telephone
network.
• Transmission system: This can be a single transmission line or a complex network
connecting source and destination.
• Receiver: Converts received signal into data. For example, a modem will accept an analog
signal coming from a network or transmission line and convert it into a digital bit stream.
• Destination: Takes incoming data from the receiver.
Key Elements of Data Communication
 A Data Communications Model
• Suppose that the input device and transmitter are components of a personal computer.
The user of the PC wishes to send a message m to another user.
1. The user activates the electronic mail package on the PC and enters the message via the
keyboard (input device).
2. The character string is briefly buffered in main memory, which can be view as a
sequence of bits (g) in memory.
3. The personal computer is connected to some transmission medium, such as a local
network or a telephone line, by an I/O device (transmitter), such as a local network
transceiver or a modem.
4. The input data are transferred to the transmitter as a sequence of voltage shifts [g(t)].
5. The transmitter is connected directly to the medium and converts the incoming stream
[g(t)] into a signal [s(t)] suitable for transmission.
 A Data Communications Model
6. The transmitted signal s(t) presented to the medium is subject to a number of impairments,
before it reaches the receiver.
7. Thus, the received signal r(t) may differ from s(t).
8. The receiver will attempt to estimate the original s(t), based on r(t) and its knowledge of the
medium, producing a sequence of bits g’(t).
9. These bits are sent to the output personal computer (as a block of bits)
10. The destination system will attempt to determine if an error has occurred and, if so,
cooperate with the source system to eventually obtain a complete, error-free block of data.
11. These data are then presented to the user via an output device, such as a printer or screen.
The message (m’) as viewed by the user will usually be an exact copy of the original
message (m)
A Data Communications Model
Data Representation
• A binary digit or bit has only two states, “0" and "I" and can represent only two
symbols, but even the simplest form of communication between computers
requires a much larger set of symbols, e.g.
1. 52 capital and small letters,
2. 10 numerals from 0 to 9
3. punctuation marks and other special symbols, and
4. terminal control characters-Carriage Return (CR), Lane Feed (LF).
Data Representation
•  
Therefore, a group of bits is used as a code to represent a symbol. The code is
usually 5 to 8 bits long. . 5-bit code can have combinations and can, therefore,
represent 32 symbols.
• Similarly an 8-bit code can represent symbols.
• A code set is the set of these codes representing the symbols.
• There are several code sets, some are used for specific applications while others
are the proprietary code sets of computer manufacturers. The following two code
sets arc very common:
I. ANSI’s 7-bit American Standard Code for Information Interchange (ASCII)
2. IBM's 8-bit Extended Binary-Coded-Decimal Interchange Code (EBCDIC).
American Standard Code for Information
Interchange (ASCII)
• ASCII is the most common code set and is used worldwide.
• It is, 7 bit code and all the possible 128 codes have defined meaning. The
code set consists of following symbols:
1. 96 graphic symbols (columns 2 to 7), comprising 94 printable characters,
SPACE. And Delete characters
2. 32 control symbols (columns 0 and I).
Data Representation
Data Representation
• The binary representation of a particular character can be easily determined from its
hexadecimal coordinate. For example, the coordinate of character "K" are (4, B) and,
therefore, its binary code is 100 1011.
• EXAMPLE 1:
Represent the message “3P.bat" in ASCII code. The eighth bit may be kept as “0''.
Solution:
Bit Positions 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
3 0 0 1 1 0 0 1 1
P 0 1 0 1 0 0 0 0
. 0 0 1 0 1 1 1 0
b 0 1 1 0 0 0 1 0
a 0 1 1 0 0 0 0 1
t 0 1 1 1 0 1 0 0
Data Transmission
• Bytes: Byte is a group or bits which is considered as a single unit during processing. It is
usually eight bits long though its length may be different . A character code, e.g., 1001011
of ASCII, is a byte having a defined meaning "K", but it should be noted that there may be
bytes which are not elements of any standard code set.
• There is always need to exchange data, commands and other control information
between a computer and its terminals or between two computers. This information is in
the form of bits.
• Data transmission refers to movement of the bits over some physical medium connecting
two or more digital devices. There are two options of transmitting the bits, namely,
1. Parallel transmission
2. Serial transmission.
Parallel Transmission
• In parallel transmission, all the bits of a byte are transmitted simultaneously on
separate wires and multiple circuits interconnecting the two devices are,
therefore, required. It is practical only if the two devices, e.g., a computer and its
associated printer are close to each other.

0 0
1 1
0 0
0 0
1 1
0 0
1 1
1 1
 Serial Transmission
• In serial transmission, bits are transmitted serially one after the other . The
least significant bit (LSB) is usually transmitted first. Note that as compared
to parallel transmission, serial transmission requires only one circuit
interconnecting the two devices. Therefore. Serial transmission is suitable
for transmission over long distance.

MSB LSB
1 1 0 0 1 1 1 0
Serial Transmission

• Write the bit transmission sequence of the message “3p.bat”.

3 p . b a t
11001100 00001010 01110100 01000110 10000110 00101110
Serial Transmission
• Bits are transmitted as electrical signals over the interconnecting wires. The two
binary states “1” and “0” are represented by two voltage levels. If one of these
states is assigned 0 volt level, the transmission is termed unipolar and if we choose
to represent a binary "1" by , say, a positive voltage +V volts and a binary “o'' by a
negative voltage -V volts, the transmission is said to be bipolar.
• The following figure shows the bipolar waveform of the character "K". Bipolar
transmission is preferred because the signal doc not have any DC component. The
transmission media usually do not allow the DC signals to pass through.
Bit Rate
•   rate is simply the number of bits which can be transmitted in a second. If is the
Bit
duration of a bit, the bit rate R will be 1/ . It must be noted that bit duration is not
necessarily the pulse duration. For example, the first pulse is of two-bit duration .
Later, we will come across signal format in which the pulse duration is only half the
bit duration.
Receiving Data Bits
• The signal received at the other end of the transmitting medium is never identical
to the transmission signal as the transmission medium distorts the signal to some
extent. As a result, the receiver has to put in considerable effort to identify the
bits. The receiver must know the time instant at which it should look for a bit.
Therefore, the receiver must have synchronized clock pulse which mark the
location of the bits. The received signal is sampled using the clock pulse and
depending on the polarity of a sample, the corresponding bit is identified.
• It is essential that the received signal is sampled at the right instants as otherwise
it could be misinterpreted. Therefore, the clock frequency should be exactly the
same as the transmission bit rate.
Receiving Data Bits
Mode of Data Transmission
• There are two methods of timing control reception of bits. The transmission
modes corresponding to these timing methods are called Asynchronous
transmission and Synchronous transmission.
• Asynchronous transmission:
• Asynchronous transmission refers to the case when the sending end commence
transmission of bytes at any instant of time. Only one byte is sent at a time and
there is no time relation between consecutive bytes, i.e., after sending a byte, the
next byte can be sent after delay. In the idle state, when no byte is being
transmitted, the polarity of the electrical signal corresponds to “1”.
Mode of Data Transmission
Mode of Data Transmission
• In synchronous transmission, the bit stream is combined into longer “frames,”
which may contain multiple bytes.
• Each byte, however, is introduced onto the transmission link without a gap
between it and the next one.
• It is left to the receiver to separate the bit stream into bytes for decoding
purposes.
• In other words, data are transmitted as an unbroken string of 1’s and 0’s, and the
receiver separates that string into the bytes, or characters, it needs to reconstruct
the information.
Mode of Data Transmission