Digital Communication

Unit 1: Overview of digital

communication systems

Dr. E. Matandirotya
Course description

• The content of this course represents the

basic knowledge necessary for
– sampling, encoding, transmitting, receiving,
decoding and conversion of digital information
using modern digital communication
technologies.
Expectations

▪ Upon completion of the course, students

should be able to:
▪ understand the basic structures and
fundamental principles of modern digital
communication systems,
▪ learn the commonly used techniques of
modulation, source coding, and channel
coding.
Before, Now and Future.........
• In today’s world, communications are
essential and pervasive, as the age of
communications with anyone, anytime,
anywhere has arrived.
• The theme is multimedia
– voice, data, image, music, text, graphics,and
video
• Simultaneous transmission.
• Advancing digital technology and the pull of
public demand for an array of innovative
applications.
• Digital communications will continue to
broaden so as to usher in even more
achievements.
• The emerging trend is toward:
– low-cost
– highspeed
– high-performance
– utterly-secure
– highly-personalized
– context-aware
– location-sensitive
– time-critical multimedia applications
What comes into your mind?
Wireless Networks

Internet

MP3 players

Smart phones

HDTV

GPS

Satellite TV and Radio

How it works
• digital is the transmission of a message using binary
digits (bits) or symbols from a finite alphabet during a finite
time interval (bit or symbol duration).
• A bit or symbol occurring in each interval is mapped onto
a continuous-time waveform that is then sent across the
channel.
• Over any finite interval, the continuous-time waveform at
the channel output belongs to a finite set of possible
waveforms.
• This is in contrast to analog communications,where the
output can assume any possible waveform.
• Digital can bring about many significant benefits, of
course, at the expense of few shortcomings
Advantages Of Digital Comms

• Design efficiency:
– Digital is inherently more efficient than analog
in exchanging power for bandwidth, the two
premium resources in communications.
– There is an unlimited range of signal
conditioning and processing options available
to the designer, effective trade-offs among
power, bandwidth,performance, and
complexity can be more readily
accommodated.
 Versatile hardware:
• The processing power of digital ICs 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.
• There is also an allowance of 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.
• There is considerable flexibility in designing communication
systems.
New and enhanced services
• Internet
• web browsing, e-mailing, texting, e-commerce,
streaming and interactive multimedia services.

• 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.
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.
Improved security

• Digital encryption, unlike analog

encryption, can make the transmitted
information virtually impossible to
decipher.
• This applies to sensitive data, such as
electronic banking and medical information
transfer.
• Secure communications can be achieved
using complex cryptographic systems.
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
• 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.
Due to major advances in digital signal processing
(DSP) technologies in the past two decades, this is
no longer a major disadvantage.
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.
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 requirced, but
at the expense of a high degree of complexity.
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.
Components of a Digital
Communication System
Information Source and Input Transducer

• The source of information can be analog

or digital,
analog: audio/video signal,
digital: teletype signal.
• In digital communication the signal
produced by this source is converted into
digital signal which consists of 1′s and 0′s.
• For this we need a source encoder.
Source Encoder
• The signal from source is converted into digital signal.
• The point to remember is we should like to use as few
binary digits as possible to represent the signal.
• In such a way this efficient representation
of the source output results in little or no redundancy.
• This sequence of binary digits is called information
sequence.
• Source Encoding or Data Compression: the process of
efficiently converting the output of whether analog or
digital source into a sequence of binary digits is known
as source encoding.
channel encoder
• The purpose of the channel encoder is to introduce, in
controlled manner, some redundancy in the binary
information sequence that can be used at the receiver to
overcome the effects of noise and interference
encountered in the transmission on the signal through
the channel.
• For example take k bits of the information sequence and
map that k bits to unique n bit sequence called code
word.
• The amount of redundancy introduced is measured by
the ratio n/k and the reciprocal of this ratio (k/n) is known
as rate of code or code rate.
Digital Modulator

• The binary sequence is passed to digital

modulator which in turns convert the
sequence into electric signals so that we
can transmit them on channel.
• The digital modulator maps the binary
sequences into signal wave forms , for
example if we represent 1 by sin x and 0
by cos x then we will transmit sin x for 1
and cos x for 0.
Channel:
• The communication channel is the physical medium that
is used for transmitting signals from transmitter to
receiver.

• In wireless system, this channel consists of atmosphere ,

for traditional telephony, this channel is wired , there are
optical channels, under water acoustic channels.

• These channels will vary on the basis of their properties

and characteristics.
Channel Decoder:
• This sequence of numbers then passed through the
channel decoder which attempts to reconstruct the
original information sequence from the knowledge of the
code used by the channel encoder and the redundancy
contained in the received data
• Note: The average probability of a bit error at the output
of the decoder is a measure of the performance of the
demodulator – decoder combination.
Source Decoder

• At the end, if an analog signal is desired

then source decoder tries to decode the
sequence from the knowledge of the
encoding algorithm.
• And which results in the approximate
replica of the input at the transmitter end.
Output Transducer:

Finally we get the desired signal in desired

format analog or digital.