Digital

Communication

Indus University
Electronics and Communication Engineering Department
 To introduce principles of Digital communication systems and
methods used in modulating and demodulating digital signals in
order to carry information from a source to a destination.
Text Books:
“Modern Digital and analog communication system” by
B.P.Lathi .Zhi Ding (international 4th Edition), OXFORD
university press.

Reference Books:
1) An Introduction to Analog and Digital Communications by
Simon Haykin, Wiley India.

2) Principle of communication system by Taub . Schilling

(2nd Edition), TATA McGRAW-HILL.

3 ) D i g i t a l c o m m u n i c a t i o n - T h e o r y , Te c h n i q u e s a n d
Applications by R. N. Mutagi, 2nd edition,OXFORD university
press.
 Main purpose of communication is to transfer information
from a source to a recipient via a channel or medium.

 Basic block diagram of a communication system:

Source Transmitter Channel Receiver

Recipient
 Source: analog or digital data
 Transmitter: transducer, amplifier, modulator, oscillator,
power amplifier, antenna
 Channel: e.g. cable, optical fibre, free space
 Receiver: antenna, amplifier, demodulator, oscillator,
power amplifier, transducer
 Recipient: e.g. person, (loud) speaker, computer
 Types of information
Voice, data, video, music, email etc.

 Communication system converts information into electrical/

electromagnetic/optical signals appropriate for the transmission medium.

 Analog systems convert analog message into signals that can propagate
through the channel.

 Digital systems convert bits(digits, symbols) into signals.

 Computers naturally generate information as characters/bits.

 Most information can be converted into bits.
 Analog signals can be converted into bits (digital data) by sampling and
quantizing (A/D conversion).
Amplitude
Analog signal
Continuous time
v
Continuous
(t) amplitude

time

Amplitude
Digital signal
V1 Discrete time,
Discrete
amplitude
V2
0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13
time
Wireline (wired)
Telephony (voice, fax, modem, DSL)
Ethernet/LAN
Cable TV
Backplane copper links

Wireless (Electromagnetic)
Over the air communication
Radio and TV broadcast
WLAN
Cellular
Radar

Fiber optics
High speed long haul data communication
High traffic data transfer
 Public Switched Telephone Network (landline, fax,modem)
 Satellite & RADAR systems
 Radio,TV broadcasting
 Cellular phones, Smart phones- mobile communication
 Computer networks (LANs, WANs, WLANs)
 Brief Chronology of Communication
Systems

 1844 Telegraph
 1876 Telephony
 1904 Radio
 1923-1938 Television
 1936 Armstrong’s case of FM radio
 1938-1945 World War II Radar and microwave
systems
 1948-1950 Information Theory and coding. C. E.
Shannon
 1962 Satellite communications begins with Telstar I.
 1962-1966 High Speed digital communication
 1972 Motorola develops cellular telephone
 Digital signals can be regenerated perfectly.

 Digital modulators are more power and bandwidth efficient.

 Efficient trade-off between power and bandwidth.

 Signal compression is possible.

 Error detection and correction is possible by coding the

digital signal which yield high fidelity and privacy.

 Common signal format for all types of signals.

 Digital hardware flexibility and miniaturization through VLSI,

EPLD, DSP, FPGA technology.
 Digital communication is more rugged than analog communication
due to high immunity of digital signal to noise and distortion.

 The use of regenerative repeater will detect the pulses and transmit
the new, clean pulses to next repeater station which does the same
process. If repaters are closely spaced then noise & distortions will be
within limits and hence pulses can be detected correctly. So digital
messages can be transmitted over long distance with relaibilty.

 It is easier and more efficient to multiplex several digital signals.

 Digital signal storage is easy and inexpensive. It has ability to

search and select information from distant electronics storehouses.

 Reproduction with digital message is reliable without

deterioration. e.g films vs CD
 Analog signal has infinite amplitudes and continuous time, hence,
cannot be regenerated perfectly.

 Signal impairments during transmission

 Distortion
 Attenuation
 Addition of thermal noise

 Digital signal has finite levels and change only at discrete

intervals, hence, easy to regenerate.
Amplitude
Original Received

Time
(a)
Sampling
Amplitude instants
Detection
threshold
Time
(b)

Amplitude Regenerated
waveform

(c) Time
 Quality of received signal depends on the carrier to noise ratio at
the receiver input.

 Quality is measured in terms of signal-to-noise ratio for analog

signals.

 Quality is measured in terms of bit error ratio for digital signals.

 Signal quality can be traded with the bandwidth.

 Tradeoff is more efficient with digital modulation.

 With analog modulation the RF signal bandwidth is equal or more than the
signal bandwidth.
 With digital modulation the RF signal bandwidth can be varied using
different levels of modulation.
 With higher level of modulation the bandwidth can be reduced requiring
less RF transmission bandwidth.
 Bandwidth of an analog signal cannot be reduced.

 Bandwidth of a digital signal can be reduced using compression

techniques.

 A signal generally has predictable (redundant) information and

also contains more information than can be perceived.

 Signal can be compressed in the digital domain by

 removing the redundancy in the signal
 removing unperceivable components in the signal
 Capacity of practical channel transmitting data is much larger than data
rate if individual sources.

 to utilize channel capacity effectively, several sources can be combined

though a digital multiplexer using the process of inetrleaving.

 Thus a channel is time shared by several messages simultaneously.

(Time Division multiplexing)
 All digital signals have uniform characteristics (data 0 or 1).

 Analog waveforms differ with the signal they represent.

 Signal processing differs with the analog signals.

 With digital signals the processing is uniform irrespective of the

original signal.

 Digital speech, audio, video and data have identical waveforms

differing only in the data rate.

 Digital systems are hence, more flexible.

Digital circuits, being switching circuits, consume less power.

Digital circuit behavior is less susceptible to variations in power

supply, temperature, ageing and tolerance in component values.

Behavior of digital systems is easily predictable, hence, systems are

more reliable.

Digital systems are easy to design with many design tools available.

Digital circuits are more dense and hence, systems can be compact.
 Due to low power consumption more circuit can be put on smaller
silicon chip area.

 Very large scale integrated circuits

 Behavior of digital systems is easily predictable, hence, systems

are more reliable.

 Digital systems are easy to design with many design tools

available.

 Digital circuits are more dense and hence, systems can be

compact
1. Digital is more robust than analog to noise and interference.
2. Digital is more viable to using regenerative repeaters.
3. Digital hardware more flexible by using microprocessors and VLSI .
4. Can be coded to yield extremely low error rates with error correction.
5. Easier to multiplex several digital signals than analog signals .
6. Digital is more efficient in trading off SNR for bandwidth .
7. Digital signals are easily encrypted for security purposes.
8. Digital signal storage is easier, cheaper and more efficient.
9. Reproduction of digital data is more reliable without deterioration .
10. Cost is coming down in digital systems faster than in analog systems and
DSP algorithms are growing in power and flexibility .
• The process of efficiently converting the output of either an analog or a digital source
into a sequence of binary digits is called source encoding or data compression.
• The source encoder compresses the data into minimum number of bits.

• The process of adding patterns of redundancy (extra bits) into the transmission path in
order to lower the error rate is called channel coding.
• The channel coder performs error control coding.
Analog Source
Signal coder
Source Mux Channel Digital
coder modulator

Access RF sub-
system
control

Channel Digital
Demux decoder
Signal demodulator
Source
sink decoder

Digital
Analog Analog
 Digital communication covers a broad area of communications techniques
including:
 Digital transmission is the transmission of digital pulses between two or
more points in a communication system.
 Digital radio is the transmitted of digital modulated analog carriers
between two or more points in a communication system.
  Input source and input transducer
The source of information can be analog or digital, e.g. analog: audio or video
signal, digital: like teletype signal.

 Source Encoder
The signal produced by source is converted into digital signal consists of 1′s and
0′s. For this we need source encoder. We should like to use as few binary digits
as possible to represent the signal. In such a way this efficient representation of
the source output results in little or no redundancy. This sequence of binary
digits is called information sequence.

 Source Encoding or Data Compression

The process of efficiently converting the output of analog or digital source into
a sequence of binary digits is known as source encoding.
  Channel Encoder:
The information sequence is passed through the channel encoder. The purpose of
the channel encoder is to introduced, in controlled manner, some redundancy in
the binary information sequence that can be used at the receiver to overcome
the effects of noise and interference encountered in the transmission on the
signal through the channel.

E.g. take k bits of the information sequence and map that k bits to unique n
bit sequence called code word. The amount of redundancy introduced is
measured by the ratio n/k and the reciprocal of this ratio (k/n) is known as
rate of code or code rate.
 Building blocks of Digital Communication
System

 Digital Modulator:
The binary sequence is passed to digital modulator which in turns convert the
sequence into electric signals so that we can transmit them on channel. The
digital modulator maps the binary sequences into signal wave forms , for
example if we represent 1 by sin x and 0 by cos x then we will transmit sin x for
1 and cos x for 0.

 Channel:
The communication channel is the physical medium that is used for transmitting
signals from transmitter to receiver.

 Digital Demodulator:
The digital demodulator processes the channel corrupted transmitted
waveform and reduces the waveform to the sequence of numbers that
represents estimates of the transmitted data symbols.
 Building blocks of Digital Communication
System

 Channel Decoder:
This sequence of numbers then passed through the channel decoder which
attempts to reconstruct the original information sequence from the
knowledge of the code used by the channel encoder and the redundancy
contained in the received data.

 The average probability of a bit error at the output of the decoder

is a measure of the performance of the demodulator – decoder
combination.

 Source Decoder:
Source decoder tries to decode the sequence from the knowledge of the
encoding algorithm. And which results in the approximate replica of the input
at the transmitter end.

 Output Transducer:
Finally we get the desired signal in desired format analog or digital.
 The modulation and coding used in a digital communication system depend
on the characteristics of the channel.

 The two main characteristics of the channel are BANDWIDTH and POWER.

 In addition the other characteristics are whether the channel is linear or

nonlinear, and how free the channel is free from the external interference.

 Five channels are considered in the digital communication, namely:

 Telephone channels
 Coaxial cables
 Optical fibers
 Microwave radio
 Satellite channels
 Digital Communication System Analog Communication System
Advantage : Disadvantages :
· inexpensive digital circuits
 privacy preserved (data encryption)  expensive analog components : L&C
 can merge different data (voice, video and  no privacy
data) and transmit over a common digital  can not merge data from diff. sources
transmission system  no error correction capability
 error correction by coding

Disadvantages : Advantages :

 larger bandwidth  smaller bandwidth

 synchronization problem is relatively  synchronization problem is relatively
difficult easier
 Analog transmission: all details must be reproduced
accurately
Distortion
Sent Received
Attenuation

Digital transmission: only discrete levels need to be

reproduced
Sent Distortion Received
Simple
Attenuation
Receiver: Was
original pulse
positive or
negative?
 Transmission segment

Source Regenerator ... Regenerator Destination

 Regenerator recovers original data sequence

and retransmits on next segment
 Can design so error probability is very small
 Then each regeneration is like the first time!
 Analogy: copy an MP3 file
 Communications is possible over very long
distances
 Digital systems vs. analog systems
 Less power, longer distances, lower system cost
 Monitoring, multiplexing, coding, encryption,
protocols…
 Requires reliable “synchronization”
 Requires A/D conversions at high rate
 Requires larger bandwidth
 Nongraceful degradation
 Performance Criteria
 Probability of error or Bit Error Rate