DATA COMMUNICATION AND

COMPUTER NETWORKS (ECEg-

4308)
Data Encoding, Transmission and Switching
Outline

 Data Transmission
 Transmission impairments
Encoding, modulation, multiplexing, and transmission
media.
 Switching
Circuit , Packet & Cell switching technologies

03/22/2025
 Transmission Impairment

 Signals travel through transmission media, which are not

perfect
 The imperfection causes signal impairment
 This means that the signal at the beginning of the medium is
not the same as the signal at the end of the medium
 What is sent is not what is received.
 Three causes of impairment are attenuation, distortion, and
noise.

03/22/2025
Attenuation

 Attenuation means a loss of energy.

03/22/2025
Distortion

 Distortion means that the signal changes its form or shape.

 Distortion can occur in a composite signal made of different frequencies.

03/22/2025
Noise

 Noise is another cause of impairment

 Several types of noise, such as thermal noise, induced noise,
crosstalk, and impulse noise, may corrupt the signal.
Thermal noise is the random motion of electrons in a wire which
creates an extra signal not originally sent by the transmitter.
Induced noise comes from sources such as motors and appliances.

 These devices act as a sending antenna, and the transmission

medium acts as the receiving antenna.
Crosstalk is the effect of one wire on the other. One wire acts as a
sending antenna and the other as the receiving antenna.
Impulse noise is a spike (a signal with high energy in a very short
time) that comes from power lines, lightning, and so on.
03/22/2025
Cont…

03/22/2025
 Key data transmission terms
Cont.

03/22/2025
 Data Transmission
 Transmission media may be classified as guided or unguided.
 In both cases, communication is in the form of electromagnetic
waves.
 With guided media, the waves are guided along a physical path;
examples are twisted pair, coaxial cable, and optical fiber.
 Unguided media provide a means for transmitting
electromagnetic waves but do not guide them; examples are
propagation through air, vacuum, and sea water.
 A guided transmission medium
 point-to-point: first, it provides a direct link between two
devices and,
second, those are the only two devices sharing the
medium.
03/22/2025

 Cont.
Data Transmission
Data transmission can be analog or digital
Analog data are continuous and take continuous values/an
infinite number of values in a range
Digital data have discrete states and take discrete values/only
a limited number of values

03/22/2025
 Cont.
Data Transmission
 The basic processes takes place on the signal before transmission
through different transmission medias are encoding, modulation,
and multiplexing.

03/22/2025
 1. Encoding

 Encoding is the process of mapping bits onto signals.

 Most of time encoding is performed by a network adaptor—a piece
of hardware that connects a node to a link
 When signals propagate over physical links, the main task is:
 to encode the binary data that the source node wants to send into the
signals that the links are able to carry.
 to decode the signal back into the corresponding binary data at the receiving
node.
 non-return to zero (NRZ), non-return to zero inverted (NRZI),
Manchester and 4B/5B encoding

03/22/2025
 Cont.
Non-return to zero (NRZ) encoding
 map the data value 1 onto the high signal and the data value 0
onto the low signal.
 The figure schematically depicts the NRZ-encoded signal
(bottom) that corresponds to the transmission of a particular
sequence of bits (top).

03/22/2025
 Cont.
Problems with NRZ encoding
 Several consecutive 1s means that the signal stays high on the link for an
extended period of time and consecutive 0s means that the signal stays low for
a long time.
 There are two fundamental problems caused by long strings of 1s or 0s.
 Baseline wander
 The receiver keeps an average of the signal it has seen so far, and then uses this average to
distinguish between low and high signals.
 Whenever the signal is significantly lower than this average, the receiver concludes that it has just
seen a 0, and likewise, a signal that is significantly higher than the average is interpreted to be a 1.
 The problem is that too many consecutive 1s or 0s cause this average to change, making it more
difficult to detect a significant change in the signal.

 Clock recovery problem

 The sender’s and the receiver’s clocks have to be precisely synchronized in order for the
03/22/2025
receiver to recover the same bits the sender transmits.
 Cont.
non-return to zero inverted (NRZI)
 The sender make a transition from the current signal to encode a 1 and stay at
the current signal to encode a 0.
 This solves the problem of consecutive 1s, but obviously does nothing for
consecutive 0s.

03/22/2025
 Cont.
Manchester encoding
 1 is encoded as a low-to-high transition and 0 being encoded as
a high-to-low transition.
 Because both 0s and 1s result in a transition to the signal, the
clock can be effectively recovered at the receiver.
 The problem with the Manchester encoding scheme is that it
doubles the rate at which signal transitions are made on the link,
which means that the receiver has half the time to detect each
pulse of the signal.
 In the case of the Manchester encoding, the bit rate is half the
baud rate, so the encoding is considered only 50% efficient.
 Both NRZ and NRZI could have been able to transmit twice as
many bits in the same time period.
03/22/2025
Differential Manchester
 It combines the ideas of RZ and NRZ-I.
 There is always a transition at the middle of the bit, but the
bit values are determined at the beginning of the bit.
 If the next bit is 0, there is a transition; if the next bit is 1,
there is none.
 The transition at the middle of the bit provides
synchronization

03/22/2025
Alternate Mark Inversion (AMI)

 A common bipolar encoding scheme is called bipolar alternate

mark inversion (AMI).
 In the term alternate mark inversion, the word mark comes from
telegraphy and means 1. So AMI means alternate I inversion.
 A neutral zero voltage represents binary O.
 Binary 1s are represented by alternating positive and negative
voltages.
 AMI is commonly used for long-distance communication, but it has
a synchronization problem when a long sequence of 0’s is present
in the data.
 By using different scrambling technique can solve this problem.
03/22/2025
Pseudo ternary

 A variation of AMI encoding is called pseudo ternary in which

the 1 bit is encoded as a zero voltage and the 0 bit is encoded
as alternating positive and negative voltages.

03/22/2025
 Cont.
4B/5B
 Attempts to address the inefficiency of the Manchester
encoding without suffering from the problem of having
extended durations of high or low signals.
 The idea of 4B/5B is to insert extra bits into the bit stream so as
to break up long sequences of 0s or 1s.
 Every 4 bits of actual data are encoded in a 5-bit code that is
then transmitted to the receiver; hence the name 4B/5B.
 The 5-bit codes are selected in such a way that each one has no
more than one leading 0 and no more than two trailing 0s.
 The resulting 5-bit codes are then transmitted using the NRZI
encoding.
 the code is only concerned about consecutive 0s—NRZI already
solves the problem of consecutive 1s.
03/22/2025
 CONT.

03/22/2025
 2. Data Transmission Media
 Data Transmission Medias are categorized into:
 Guided – wire

 the medium is more important

 Unguided - wireless

 the bandwidth produced by the antenna is more important

Guided Transmission Media
 Twisted Pair

 Coaxial cable

 Optical fiber

03/22/2025
 CONT.
Twisted Pair

03/22/2025
 Cont.
Twisted Pair - Applications
 Most common medium
 Telephone network
 Between house and local exchange (subscriber loop)

 Within buildings
 To private branch exchange (PBX)

 For local area networks (LAN)

 10Mbps or 100Mbps

 Pros
 Cheap
 Easy to work with
 Cons
 Low data rate
 Short range

03/22/2025
 Cont.
Unshielded and Shielded TP

 Unshielded Twisted Pair (UTP)

 Ordinary telephone wire
 Cheapest
 Easiest to install
 Suffers from external EM interference
 Shielded Twisted Pair (STP)
 Metal braid or sheathing that reduces interference
 More expensive
 Harder to handle (thick, heavy)

03/22/2025
 Cont.
Coaxial Cable

03/22/2025
 Cont.
Coaxial Cable Applications
 Most versatile medium
 Television distribution
 Ariel to TV
 Cable TV

 Long distance telephone transmission

 Can carry 10,000 voice calls simultaneously
 Being replaced by fiber optic

 Short distance computer systems links

 Local area networks

03/22/2025
Optical Fiber Cont.

Figure 3.7: Optical fiber

03/22/2025
 Cont.
Optical Fiber - Benefits

 Greater capacity
 Data rates of hundreds of Gbps
 Smaller size & weight
 Lower attenuation
 Electromagnetic isolation
 Greater repeater spacing
 10s of km at least
 Applications
 Long-haul trunks
 Metropolitan trunks
 Rural exchange trunks
 Subscriber loops
 LANs
03/22/2025
 Cont.
Unguided Transmission Media
 Wireless transmission
 Transmission and reception via antenna
 Frequencies
2GHz to 40GHz
 Microwave
 Highly directional
 Point to point
 Satellite
30MHz to 1GHz
 Omni directional
 Broadcast radio
3 x 1011 to 2 x 1014
 Infrared
03/22/2025  Laser
 Cont.

03/22/2025
3. MULTIPLEXING

 Whenever the bandwidth of a medium linking two devices is

greater than the bandwidth needs of the devices, the link can
be shared. Multiplexing is the set of techniques that allows the
simultaneous transmission of multiple signals across a single
data link. As data and telecommunications use increases, so
does traffic.
Frequency-Division Multiplexing (analog signals)
Wavelength-Division Multiplexing (Optical signals)
Time-Division Multiplexing (Digital signals)

03/22/2025
4. Data Switching

 The switching system is a collection of switching elements

arranged and controlled in such a way as to setup a
communication path between any two distant points.
 There are three main types of switching namely a circuit
switching, packet switching, and cell switching.
 The switching technique used in computer communication
network or data transfer is packet switching.
 The switching technique used in PSTN is circuit switching.
 The switching technique used in Mobile communication is cell
switching.
 These switching techniques differs in the way the resource
(path) is allocated (established).
03/22/2025
 Cont.

03/22/2025
THANK YOU!

QUESTIONS?

03/22/2025