Analogue and Digital Communications Lecturer: Dr.

Sami Aldalahmeh

Chapter 1: Introduction to Communication

Lecture 1
Al-Zaytoonah University of Jordan Communication and Computer Eng.

1.1 Introduction
Communication in electrical engineering refers to the process of transferring information from
a source to a destination. In any communication scenario there are three main elements in
the communication process:

1. Transmitter.

2. Channel.

3. Receiver.

The transmitter sends converts the information into a form suitable for transmission,
e.g. electrical. The information sources, however, can be roughly classified into natural
(e.g. speech, acoustics, pictures) and man-made, such as computer data. The former has an
analogue form whereas the latter is fundamentally digital.
The communication takes place over a medium or a channel. This channel can take
several forms. Take, for example, the human speech. Naturally the speech is carried by
acoustic waves in the air from the speaker to the listener. However, when wired telephones
are used the speech is carried by electrical signals in the telephone wires. Furthermore, if
a mobile phone is used the speech is carried by electromagnetic waves through space. Note
that in the three cases the channel was air, wires and space. Communication is not only
used by humans, over species use a rather evolved communication schemes. For example,
elephants use seismic signals to communicate over tens or hundred of kilometres. Moreover,
dolphins use acoustic signals to communicate in the sea.
The receiver primary task is to collect the transmitted information or message and convert
it back to a useful form. However, this task is complicated by noise and interference picked
up by the received signal.
In general, there are two modes of communications:

1. Broadcasting, in which a single transmitter communicates with several receivers. Such

as radio or television transmission.

1
2

2. Point-to-point, where the communication takes place between a pair of transmitters

and receivers.

A communication network, in fact, consists of multiple point-to-point communication

pairs connected together.

1.2 Modern Communication Systems

A modern communication system is almost always takes a digital form as as shown in Fig. 1.1.
Next, we will briefly discuss the main block in this system.

Data Source Channel Modu

Source Encoding Encoding -lator PA

Channel

Dem Channel Source Data

LNA -odulator Decoding Decoding Sink

Figure 1.1: Modern communication system.

Data source: Is the source of digital information in the form of bits. This source might
be inherently digital, such as computer data, or analogue but digitized like speech,
pictures and videos. This is done by means of sampling and quantization processes.

Source encoding: In practice, the amount of digital data to be transmitted is too large
for the communication system to handle. Hence it is compressed in some manner to
reduce the number of bits or the data rate effectively to be transmitted. Examples
of source coding are the JPG/JPEG picture file formats, WAV sound file format and
MPEG video format.

Channel encoding: The source-encoded bits might be corrupted by noise when transmit-
ted through the channel. So, channel encoding is used to detect and possibly correct
and errors in the received bits. This is done by adding some redundancy to transmitted
bits.
1.3. COMMUNICATION RESOURCES 3

Modulator: The modulator is the interface between the digital information and the ana-
logue communication channel. It converts the digital bits (or symbols) into analogue
voltage waveforms.

Power amplifier (PA): The PA amplifies the voltage signal provided by the modulator.
This block is an active electronic system that injects power into the channel.

Channel: It is the communication medium. As stated earlier, it can be a pair of wires,

an Ethernet cable, coaxial cable, free-space, water or even live tissue. The channel is
the bottleneck of the communication system, which is designed to accommodates and
solves the its problem. Some problems the channel introduce are additive noise, power
fading and signal dispersion.

Low-noise amplifier (LNA): It an electronic system that amplifies the often weak re-
ceived signal while adding a small amount of noise to it.

Demodulator: It is responsible for inverting the modulator’s doing. i.e., detecting the
received analogue voltage and converting it back to bits.

Channel decoder: Detects and possibly corrects errors introduce by the channel with the
aid of the encoder’s introduced redundancy.

Source decoder: Restores back the original source data from the encoded bits in the re-
ceived message.

Data sink: Is the communication destination where the information is consumed.

1.3 Communication Resources

There are two primary resources in communication systems: transmission power and band-
width. Both resources are related to the channel noise and hence the performance of the
communication system. As the transmission power increases, intuitively the effect of the
channel’s noise decreases. Another aspect of increasing the transmission power the effective
communication range increases as well.
Matters are more subtle with the bandwidth. Let us start with the notion of bandwidth in
communication systems. Bandwidth is essentially the frequency band used or permitted by
the channel. On the other hand, bandwidth is actually related to the transmitted information
variation rate. For example, larger data file can be transmitted in smaller time if a large
bandwidth is used. However, a larger bandwidth means that the channel adds more noise
to the received signal.
4

The relationships between power, bandwidth and communication performance may not
be clear in analogue systems as it is the case in digital systems. This is demonstrated by
Shannon’s famous channel capacity theorem, which states

C = B log2 (1 + SNR) bit/sec (1.1)

where C is the channel capacity in bit/sec or bps, B is the bandwidth in Hertz and SNR is
the signal-to-noise-ratio defined as
Pt Pt
SNR = = (1.2)
Pn NB
where N is the noise power spectral density. Plugging (1.2) in (1.1) yields
 
Pt
C = B log2 1 + (1.3)
NB

which clearly the shows the role of the bandwidth in the capacity.