Wong & Lok: Theory of Digital Communications 0.
Overview
Chapter 0
Overview
Our goal is to acquire a basic understanding of digital communications. To do so, we study the ba-
sic design and analysis principles of digital communication systems. This set of notes is written for
the purpose. It can be divided into two parts. The £rst part describes, in detail, some common dig-
ital modulation and demodulation techniques, which form the basis of digital communications. The
second part presents a survey of various advanced topics, such as synchronization, equalization, di-
versity reception, and error control coding. The combination of the two parts aims to provide a solid
introduction to modern digital communication theory.
0.1 Digital communication systems
A digital communication system conveys information in digital form from a source to one or more
destinations through a communication channel. Figure 0.1 gives the block diagram of a typical digital
communication system. The “standard” components shown in Figure 0.1 include (in the order of the
¤ow of information):
1. information source or input transducer
2. source encoder
3. encryptor
4. channel encoder
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Wong & Lok: Theory of Digital Communications
Figure 0.1: Block diagram of a typical digital communication system
Information Source Channel Digital
Encryptor
Source Encoder Encoder Modulator
Transmitter
Commun.
Analog/Digital Digital Channel
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Receiver Analog
Timing &
Carrier
Synchronizer
Information Source Channel Digital
Decryptor
Sink Decoder Decoder Demodulator
0. Overview
Wong & Lok: Theory of Digital Communications 0. Overview
5. digital modulator
6. communication channel
7. timing and carrier synchronizer
8. digital demodulator
9. channel decoder
10. decryptor
11. source decoder
12. information sink or output transducer
The £rst £ve components, which are pertinent to the transmission of information, form the transmitter
of the communication system. The last six components, which are pertinent to the reception of infor-
mation, make up the receiver of the communication system. We point out that some of the components
above may not be found in some digital communication systems. However, any digital communication
system should contain a modulator, a demodulator, and a synchronizer. Our main focus is on these
three components. Later in the notes, we will brie¤y introduce the concept of channel coding (error
control coding). Source coding and encryption are not covered here.
To facilitate the design and evaluation of communication systems, we need to establish a measure
of performance. For a digital communication system, a common performance measure is the probabil-
ity of the event that an error1 occurs at the receiver. There are many such error events, at various stages
of the reception, we can employ to set up our performance measure. In most of the discussions fol-
lowed, we use the average symbol error probability (or the average bit error probability in the cases of
binary symbols) at the output of the demodulator as our performance measure. This is the probability
that the symbol estimate given by the demodulator does not correspond to the transmitted symbol. In a
(channel) coded system, we also use the average symbol error probability at the output of the (channel)
decoder as a measure of performance. We again would like to point out that the average symbol error
probability may not be the most meaningful performance indicator in some systems. For example,
1
An error occurs when the information output by the receiver does not match the transmitted information
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Wong & Lok: Theory of Digital Communications 0. Overview
the quality of the received speech may be a more meaningful performance measure in a voice com-
munication system. Nevertheless, due to its simplicity and generality, we (and most communication
researchers) adopt the average symbol error probability as the performance measure based on which
we evaluate and design digital communication systems. With this in mind, we study some common
analysis techniques to obtain the average symbol error probabilities of different communication sys-
tems. Our primary design objective is to minimize the average symbol error probability of a digital
communication system.
0.2 Communication channels
The communication channel provides a connection through which the information-bearing signal prop-
agates. It is perhaps the most important component of a communication system. The design of all other
components in Figure 0.1 depends heavily on the characteristics of the communication channel. There
are many different types of physical communication channels, such as:
1. wireline channels
2. wireless channels
3. £ber optic channels
4. underwater acoustic channels
5. storage channels
Different kinds of channels can have very different characteristics. In order to design an “ef£cient”
digital communication system over a speci£c communication channel, we need to study the charac-
teristics of the channel extensively and carefully. Unfortunately, this is impractical for our general
treatment on digital communication theory. Instead, we adopt a model-based approach here, i.e., we
construct a generic mathematical channel model to represent a “typical” communication channel. For
this purpose, our channel model describes the physical communication channel as well as the proper-
ties of the equipments, such as antennas and ampli£ers, necessary to access the channel. The model
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Wong & Lok: Theory of Digital Communications 0. Overview
not only needs to be general enough to approximate most of the physical channels described above,
but also simple enough to facilitate the analysis and design of the communication system.
To this end, we notice that the major characteristic of a communication channel we are interested
in is how the channel distorts the information-bearing signal. We start by listing out some common
channel defects:
1. thermal noise in the electronic devices
2. signal attenuation
3. amplitude and phase distortion
4. multipath distortion
5. £nite-bandwidth (lowpass £lter) distortion
6. impulsive noise
Based on knowledge of these channel defects, we construct the generic channel model. Suppose we
use the symbol s(t) to denote the transmitted signal at the output of the modulator, then it is found
that the following linear £lter model (see Figure 0.2) suf£ciently approximates the behaviors of many
typical communication channels:
Z ∞
r(t) = c(τ ; t)s(t − τ )dτ + n(t), (1)
−∞
where r(t) represents the received signal at the input of the demodulator, n(t) is a random process
which models the thermal and impulsive noises, and c(τ, t) is a linear time-varying £lter 2 which models
the other channel distortions listed above. We note that the linear (time-varying) channel model in (1)
is very general and we work with simpli£cations of this model in many cases. Among the various
common simplications of the general model, the additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN) model is
perhaps the most studied and important. In the AWGN model, c(τ, t) = δ(τ ) and (1) reduces to
r(t) = s(t) + n(t), (2)
2
We note that c(τ, t) can be deterministic or random depending on the channel it models.
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Wong & Lok: Theory of Digital Communications 0. Overview
s(t) r(t)
c(τ ;t)
n(t)
Communication channel
Figure 0.2: Linear £lter channel model
where n(t) is a zero-mean wide-sense stationary Gaussian random process with autocorrelation func-
N0
tion Rn (τ ) = 2
δ(τ ). The factor N0 /2 is called the two-sided noise spectral density of the noise n(t).
This model is primarily employed to represent the situation in which the only channel defect is the
thermal noise in the electronic devices of a communication system. Although AWGN channels are
rare in practice (except in deep space communications), because of its simplicity, we use the AWGN
model as the cornerstone of our introduction to digital communications.
0.3 More information
Check the course homepage at http://wireless.ece.ufl.edu/˜eel6535/
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