Principles of Communication Systems

EC 303
Time: Mon/Tue 11-12:45
Instructor: Dr. Priyanka Das and Prof Jyotsna Bapat
ECE Branches
ECE
Communication Communication Signal RF and
Systems
Network Processing Photonics VLSI

Analog Digital Wireless

Comm Comm Comm

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 What is Communication?

• Communication is nothing but transmitting some signal from a

source to a destination through a media / channel reliably at a
maximal rate.

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What is Communication?
• The process of information transfer across space or time.
• Communication across space:
• Radio waves carrying our phone conversation from cell phone to the base station
• coaxial cables/optical fiber delivering television from a remote location to our home.
• Communication across time:
• Storage of information, DVDs, hard drives etc.

• Conversion of information into a signal, termed the transmitted signal, compatible

with the physical medium of interest.
• Propagation of the signal through the physical medium (termed the channel) in space
or time;
• Extraction of information from the signal (termed the received signal) obtained after
propagation through the medium. 4
 Example1: Radio

• Source: Microphone
• Destination: Speakers in the radio receiver
• Media/channel: Space

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 Example2: Television

• Source: Video camera and microphone

• Destination: Picture tube and speaker in TV receiver
• Media/channel: Space

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 Example3: Telephone

• Source: Microphone in phone set

• Destination: Speaker in phone set
• Media/channel: Wire line

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 Example4: Cellular Mobile

• Source: Microphone in phone set

• Destination: Speaker in phone set
• Media/channel: Space

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 Example5: Storage channel

• CD, Magnetic disk, Magnetic tape

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Goal of this course

• Learn various fundamental concepts of communication systems which

are essential to understand advanced communication systems such as
cellular systems, and advanced wireless communication systems

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Analog Communication
Speech/audio/video

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Analog Communication
• Both the message signal and transmission media are analog
(continuous time, continuous amplitude) in nature
• Example: Broadcasting music over the air (by means of electromagnetic wave)
from a FM station
• Modulation: process of encoding the information into a signal that
can be transmitted over a channel

• Early communication systems are analog: AM (amplitude modulation)

and FM (frequency modulation) radio, analog television, first
generation cellular phone technology (based on FM), audio cassettes
etc.
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Transition towards Digital?
• While analog communication might seem like the most natural
option, it is in fact obsolete.
• Example
• Cellular phone technologies (from 2G onwards)  Digital
• vinyl records and audio cassettes  CDs,
• videocassettes  DVDs.
• Broadcast radio and television  Digital radio and television broadcast.

• Let us define what do we mean by digital communication.

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Digital Communication
• The conceptual basis for digital communication was established in 1948 by Claude
Shannon, when he founded the field of information theory. There are two main threads
to this theory:
1. Source coding and compression: Any information-bearing signal can be represented
efficiently, to within a desired accuracy of reproduction, by a digital signal, which in its
simplest form is just a sequence of binary digits or bits. This is true whether the
information source is text, speech, audio or video.

• Techniques for performing the mapping from the original source signal to a bit
sequence are generically termed source coding.

• They often involve compression, or removal of redundancy, in a manner that exploits

the properties of the source signal .
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Digital Communication
2. Digital information transfer:
• Reliably transfer the bit sequence at the output of the source encoder across space or time.
• Reliability depends on the relative strengths of the signal and noise or interference, and the
distortions imposed by the channel.
• Shannon showed that, once we fix these operational parameters for any communication
channel, there exists a maximum possible rate of reliable communication, termed the
channel capacity.
• Thus, given the information bits at the output of the source encoder, in principle, we can
transmit them reliably over a given link as long as the information rate is smaller than the
channel capacity,
• This sharp transition between reliable and unreliable communication differs fundamentally
from analog communication, where the quality of the reproduced source signal typically
degrades gradually as the channel conditions get worse.
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Components of a Digital Communication System

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Source Encoder (Msg signalinfor. bits)
• Removes the redundancy associated with the message signal (speech, image, video),
generates information bits.
• Example:
• A laptop display resolution 1024 pixels
• For a gray scale image: 8 bits /pixel
• Total # of bits = 1024 8 = 6.3 million bits or 0.8 Mbyte
• Intensities for neighbouring pixels are highly correlated
• Take 2D-FT, discard high frequency components get compressed image

• As the compression ratio increases, less no of bits are required to represent an image
at the expense of perceptual degradation
• For video, we can exploit both spatial as well as temporal correlation across successive
frames.

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Channel Encoder (infor. bitscoded bits)
• Adds redundancy to the information bits for error recovery after
transmission over the channel
• Channel introduces noise and distortion, which can change the
original information bits
• Example (Repetition coding):
• Transmit 010..
• Channel output 001 erroneous detection
• Repeat each bit 3 times: transmit 000 111 000
• Channel output 011 011 001  majority rule detection: 110
• We have improved performance by introducing redundancy
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Modulator (coded bits continuous-time tx signal)
• Transform the coded bits to continuous-time signal, physical
waveforms to be emitted by the transmitter antenna.

• Generally, bandwidth and central freq already specified; fit the signal
in this window.
• WiFi transmission 20-40 MHz bandwidth in the 2.4 GHz band
• 4th generation mobile: 1-20 MHz bandwidth in the 700 MHz-3 GHz band

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Channel (Tx signalnoisy rx signal)
• It introduces distortion and noise, and possibly interference to the
transmitted signal
• Mathematical model needs to be developed to characterize the
performance
• Wireline channel: LTI
• Wireless channel: LTV (linear time-varying)
• Other factors affecting the signal: mobility, multipath, fading

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Demodulator (noisy rx signalestimated coded bits)
• It processes noisy received signal from the channel and reproduces
estimation of coded bits

• Example: +s(t)0 and –s(t)1

• Performs other tasks: synchronization (phase, frequency, and timing

sync), equalization (compensating for distortion caused by the
channel)

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Channel Decoder (est. coded bitsest. inf. bits)
• It processes demodulator output and generates estimated
information bits.
• Do the reverse operation of channel encoder
• Majority rule based decision making for repetition coding

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Source Decoder (est. inf. bits  est. message signal)
• It processes the estimated information bits and generates an
estimation of the message
• Example: For digital gray scale image, the compressed image is
translated back to a pixel-by-pixel representation by taking Inverse FT
of the coefficients that survived after compression.

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Digital Comm. - Pros/Cons
• Comparing the block diagrams for analog and digital communication, we see that
the digital communication system involves far more processing.
• This is not an obstacle for modern transceiver design, due to the exponential
increase in the computational power of low-cost silicon integrated circuits.
Advantages:
1. Regeneration: Repeaters are generally used to combat the signal distortion due
to transmission media.

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2. Immune to noise: Digital circuits (on/off- two states only) are less subject to
distortion and interference than are analog circuits (infinite variety of shapes).
Once the analog signal is distorted, the distortion cannot be removed by
amplification.
3. Error correcting code: Channel coding techniques can be used for error
correction and detection, resulting high signal fidelity.
4. Hardware flexibility: Digital h/w are more flexible than analog counterpart and
cheaper too.

Drawback of digital comm.

 Synchronization tasks need to be performed at various levels (significant
amount of resources involved).
Non-graceful degradation: If SNR drops below a threshold, signal quality
suddenly changes from very good to very poor. However, most analog comm.
systems degrade more gracefully.

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Ingredients of a Communication System

Business: Identify target customer/market, acquire funding

Network design: network architecture, router design, protocols

and their implementation

Physical link design: channel and interference modeling,

transceiver design, signal processing algorithms This Course

Transceiver implementation: Integrated circuit implementation

of signal processing, RF; antenna design

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Key Concepts
• Review of what you know already (Chapter 2)
• Signals and systems review
• Baseband and passband signals
• How to send information with radio signals (Chapter 3)
• Amplitude modulation
• Angle modulation
• Superheterodyne reception
• Phase locked loop
• Digital modulation (Chapter 4)
• Signal constellation
• Nyquist criterion for signaling over a bandlimited channel
• Modulation techniques: QAM, PSK, orthogonal modulation

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Key Concepts
• Statistical models for signals and noise (Chapter 5)
• Review of probability and random variables
• Random processes
• Signal-to-noise ratio computations

• Optimal Demodulation (Chapter 6)

• Gaussian noise model
• Detection theory basics
• Signal space techniques: geometric approach to optimal detection
• Optimal receiver design
• Performance analysis
• Bit error probability
• Link Budget analysis
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Reference Book
[1] Upamanyu Madhow, “Introduction to Communication Systems”,
Cambridge University Press

[2] B. P. Lathi, “Modern Digital and Analog Communication Systems”,

Oxford University Press

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List of topics
Date Topic Text
Week 1 Introduction to the course. Introduction to communication Ch 1
systems
Weeks 2-3 Signal and Systems: Review. Fourier Transform and Series. Ch 2
Complex Baseband representation (Quiz 1)
Week 4-6 Analog Communication, AM Tx and Rx, FM Tx and Rx, PLL Ch 3
Week 7-8
Digital Modulation (QPSK, QAM), Nyquist Criterion for ISI Ch 4
avoidance (Midterm)
Week 9-10 PCM, DPCM, DM, Source Coding
Week 11 Review of Basic probability and random variables Ch 5
Week 12-14 Optimum Demodulation for AWGN (Quiz 2) Ch 6

Week 15 Link Budget analysis Ch 6

Endterm

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Assessment:

• Homework Assignment (4): 15%

• Quiz (2): 20%
• Midterm: 30%
• Endterm: 30%
• Attendance : 5% (No recording if you don’t attend class)

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