Transmission Impairments

With any communications system, the signal that is received may differ from the signal that
is transmitted, due to various transmission impairments. For analog signals, these
impairments introduce various random modifications that degrade the signal quality. For
digital signals, bit errors may be introduced, such that a binary 1 is transformed into a binary
0 or vice versa. In this section, we examine the various impairments and how they may affect
the information-carrying capacity of a communication link
Significant Impairments
• • Attenuation and attenuation distortion
• • Delay distortion
• • Noise