ECN 302 Notes
ECN 302 Notes
ECN 302 Notes
The conventional methods of communication used analog signals for long distance communications, which suffer
from many losses such as distortion, interference, and other losses including security breach.
In order to overcome these problems, the signals are digitized using different techniques. The digitized signals allow
the communication to be more clear and accurate without losses.
The following figure indicates the difference between analog and digital signals. The digital signals consist of 1s and
0s which indicate High and Low values respectively.
Advantages of Digital Communication
The effect of distortion, noise, and interference is much less in digital signals as they are less affected.
The signal is un-altered as the pulse needs a high disturbance to alter its properties, which is very difficult.
Signal processing functions such as encryption and compression are employed in digital circuits to maintain
the secrecy of the information.
The probability of error occurrence is reduced by employing error detecting and error correcting codes.
Combining digital signals using Time Division Multiplexing (TDM) is easier than combining analog signals
using Frequency Division Multiplexing (FDM).
Many of the digital circuits have almost common encoding techniques and hence similar devices can be used
for a number of purposes.
Digital transmission provide data processing options and flexibilities not available in analog transmission.
Source
This is a transducer which takes a physical input and converts it to an electrical signal (Example: microphone). This
block also consists of an analog to digital converter where a digital signal is needed for further processes.
Source Encoder
The source encoder compresses the data into minimum number of bits. This process helps in effective utilization
of the bandwidth. It removes the redundant bits (unnecessary excess bits, i.e., zeroes).
Channel Encoder
The channel encoder, does the coding for error correction. During the transmission of the signal, due to the noise in
the channel, the signal may get altered and hence to avoid this, the channel encoder adds some redundant bits to the
transmitted data. These are the error correcting bits.
Digital Modulator
The signal to be transmitted is modulated here by a carrier. The signal is also converted to analog from the digital
sequence, in order to make it travel through the channel or medium.
Channel
The channel or a medium, allows the analog signal to transmit from the transmitter end to the receiver end.
Digital Demodulator
This is the first step at the receiver end. The received signal is demodulated as well as converted again from analog
to digital. The signal gets reconstructed here.
Channel Decoder
The channel decoder, after detecting the sequence, does some error corrections. The distortions which might occur
during the transmission, are corrected by adding some redundant bits. This addition of bits helps in the complete
recovery of the original signal.
Source Decoder
The resultant signal is once again digitized by sampling and quantizing so that the pure digital output is obtained
without the loss of information. The source decoder recreates the source output.
Output Transducer
This is the last block which converts the signal into the original physical form, which was at the input of the
transmitter. It converts the electrical signal into physical output (Example: loud speaker).
Output Signal
This is the output which is produced after the whole process. Example: The sound signal received.
Elements of Digital Communication
Basic signal processing functions, which may be viewed as transformation, classified into the following nine groups:
Complex Baseband Representation of Bandpass Signals
Almost every communication system operates by modulating an information bearing waveform onto a sinusoidal
carrier.
The two sided transmission bandwidth of a signal is typically denoted by BT Hertz so that the one-sided spectrum of
the bandpass signal is zero except in [𝑓𝐶 − BT /2, 𝑓𝐶 + BT /2].
This implies that a bandpass signal satisfies the following constraint: BT /2 < 𝑓𝐶 .
The relative sizes of BT and 𝑓𝐶 are not important, only that the spectrum takes negligible values around DC.
Note that the LPF simply removes the double frequency term associated with the down conversion.