Digital Communications Basics (A Review)

A digital communications system is one that is based on transmitting and receiving bit streams
“i.e 0s or 1s.
The purpose of a Communication System is to transport an information bearing signal
from a source to a user destination via a communication channel. •
A digital signal is obtained from sampling an analogue signal derived from some speech or video
system. The signal is then converted into a binary signal consisting of 0 s and 1 s .
The goal is to accomplish the data transmission task as efficiently as possible with a certain
degree of reliability. In digital communication systems, the metric of reliability for a given
transmission is the bit error rate (BER) or probability of bit error.

Advantages of digital transmission

• Easy to regenerate the distorted “0, 1” signal pulses.

• Regenerative repeaters along the transmission path can detect a digital signal and retransmit a
new, clean signal The repeaters prevent accumulation of noise along the path thus giving greater
immunity to noise.
• Digital hardware implementation permits use of microprocessors, mini-processors, digital
switching and VLSI resulting in lower cost
• Shorter design and production cycle
• Easier to multiplex several digital signals
• Easy to regenerate the distorted “0, 1” signal pulses.
Error detecting and Error correcting codes improve the system performance by reducing the
probability of error.
• Combining digital signals using is simpler than combining analog signals. The different types
of signals such as data, voice, TV are carried together as identical signals in a digital
communication system.
• Signal jamming can be avoided by use of spread spectrum technologies

Disadvantages of digital transmission

Large System Bandwidth: - Digital transmission requires a large system bandwidth to
communicate the same information in a digital as compared to analog format.

System Synchronization: - Digital detection requires system synchronization whereas the

analog signals generally have no such requirement.

Digital communication system

Information source – this could be Analog Data: Microphone, speech signal, image, video etc...
– Discrete (Digital) Data: keyboard, binary numbers, hex numbers, etc.
When the source is analogue the data must be sampled, quantized and encoded to bits
Source encoder – Represent the transmitted data more efficiently and remove redundancy
Two types of encoding: – Lossless data encoding
• Data can be recovered without any missing information – Lossy data encoding
• Data removed in encoding cannot be recovered again transmitted data due the noise. •
Channel encoder: – To control the noise and to detect and correct the errors that can occur in the
transmitted data due to noise
There are two methods of channel coding:
Block Coding: The encoder takes a block of k information bits from the source encoder and adds
r error control bits, where r is dependent on k and error control capabilities desired.
Convolution Coding: The information bearing message stream is encoded in a continuous
fashion by continuously interleaving information bits and error control bits.
• Modulator: – Represent the data in a form to make it compatible with the channel
• Demodulator: – Removes the carrier signal and reverses the process of the Modulator
• Channel decoder: –. Detects and corrects the errors in the signal gained from the channel
Source decoder: – Decompresses the data into it’s original format.
• Information Sink – The User
.