Course Description: 

Digital communication is one of the fundamental courses in the electronics and communication engineering discipline. The basic principles, techniques, trade-offs, and fundamental limits, which are essential to the successful design of a digital communication system will be introduced. This course introduces the fundamentals of digital signalling, information theory and coding, digital transmission and reception. Emphasis is placed on understanding system design goals and to optimize the trade-off among basic system parameters such as signal-to-noise ratio, bandwidth, etc.

Syllabus:        

Introduction to digital communications. Review of the concepts of signals, systems, random variables, and random processes. Analog to digital conversion: sampling, quantization, and encoding. PCM, Differential PCM, Delta Modulation (DM), and Adaptive Delta Modulation (ADM).

Digital baseband transmission: geometric representation of signal waveforms, binary pulse transmission, optimum receiver for binary modulated signals in additive white Gaussian noise channels, bit-error-rate performance. Transmission through band limited channels, Nyquist criterion, inter symbol interference (ISI), Eye diagram.

Introduction to pass-band transmission model: generation, detection, signal space diagram, error rate performance – coherent and non-coherent detection systems, bit error probability and power spectra of BPSK, QPSK, FSK and MSK schemes, differential phase shift keying, comparison of digital modulation systems using a single carrier, carrier and symbol synchronization.

Information theory and error control coding: communication channel, channel matrix, channel capacity, discrete memory less channels, linear block codes, cyclic codes, convolutional codes, maximum likelihood decoding of convolution codes, Viterbi Algorithm, Trellis coded modulation.

Overview of spread spectrum: pseudo-noise sequences: a notion of spread spectrum: direct sequence spread spectrum, frequency hop spread spectrum, maximum length and Gold codes.