Introduction To Communication System

Introduction
 Communication is the process of exchanging information.
People communicate to convey their thoughts, ideas, and
feelings to others.
 The process of communication is inherent to all human life
and includes verbal, nonverbal (body language), print, and
electronic processes.
 Two of the main barriers to human communication are
language and distance. Language barriers arise between
persons of different cultures or nationalities.
 Communicating over long distances is another problem.
Communication between early human beings was limited
to face-to-face encounters.
 Long-distance communication was first accomplished by
sending simple signals such as drumbeats, and smoke
signals.
 When messages were relayed from one location to another,
even greater distances could be covered.
 The distance over which communication could be sent was
extended by the written word.
 For many years, long-distance communication was limited
to the sending of verbal or written messages by human
runner, horseback, ship, and later trains.
 Well-known forms of electronic communication, such as
the telephone, radio, TV, and the Internet, have increased
our ability to share information.
 The way we do things and the success of our work and
personal lives are directly related to how well we
communicate.
 Figure 1.1 presents three familiar communication
scenarios: a wire-line telephone-to-cellular phone
connection, a TV broadcasting system, and a computer
network.
 Because of the numerous examples of communication
systems in existence, it would be unwise to attempt to
study the details of all kinds of communication systems in
this book.
 Instead, the most efficient and effective way to learn is by
studying the major functional blocks common to practically
all communication systems.
Block Diagram Of Communication
Systems
 To begin, it is essential to establish a typical
communication system model as shown in Fig. 1.2. The
key components of a communication system are as follows.
 The source originates a message, such as a human voice, a
television picture, an e-mail message, or data.
 If the data is nonelectric (e.g., human voice, e-mail text, a
scene), it must be converted by an input transducer into
an electric waveform referred to as the message signal
through physical devices such as a microphone, a computer
keyboard, or a charge-coupled device (CCD) camera.
 The transmitter transforms the input (message) signal into
an appropriate form for efficient transmission. The
transmitter may consist of one or more subsystems: an
analog-to-digital (A/D) converter, an encoder, and a
modulator. Similarly, the receiver may consist of a
demodulator, a decoder, and a digital-to-analog (D/A)
converter.
 The channel is a medium of choice that can convey the
electric signals at the transmitter output over a distance.
 A typical channel can be a pair of twisted copper wires
(e.g., in telephone and DSL), coaxial cable (e.g. in
television and Internet), an optical fiber, or a radio cellular
link. Additionally, a channel can also be a point-to-point
connection in a mesh of interconnected channels that form
a communication network.
 The receiver reprocesses the signal received from the
channel by reversing the signal transformation made at the
transmitter and removing the distortions caused by the
channel.
 The receiver output is passed to the output transducer,
which converts the electric signal to its original form—the
message.
 The destination is the unit where the message transmission
terminates.
DESIGN CHALLENGES: CHANNEL
DISTORTIONS AND NOISES
 A channel is a physical medium that behaves practically
like an imperfect filter that generally attenuates the signal
and distorts the transmitted waveforms.
 The channel attenuation depends on the distance the signals
must travel between the transmitter and the receiver.
 Signal waveforms are further distorted because of physical
phenomena such as frequency-dependent electronics,
multipath effects, and Doppler shift.
 For example, a frequency-selective channel causes different
amounts of attenuation and phase shift to different
frequency components within the input signal.
 A short rectangular pulse can be rounded or “spread out”
during transmission over a low-pass channel. These types
of distortion, called linear distortion.
 Channels may also cause nonlinear distortion through
attenuation that varies with the signal amplitude.
 In a practical environment, signals passing through
communication channels not only experience channel
distortions but also are corrupted along the path by
interfering signals and disturbances lumped under the
broad term noise.
 These interfering signals are often random and
unpredictable from sources both external and internal.
 External noise includes interference signals transmitted on
nearby channels, human-made noise generated by faulty
switch contacts of electric equipment.
 Internal noise results from thermal motion of charged
particles in conductors.
 Proper care can mitigate the effect of internal noise but can
never fully eliminate it. Noise is one of the underlying
factors that limit the rate of telecommunications.
MESSAGE SOURCES
 Messages in communication systems can be either digital
or analog. Digital messages are ordered combinations of
finite symbols or code-words. For example, printed English
consists of 26 letters, 10 numbers, a space, and several
punctuation marks.
 Thus, a text document written in English is a digital
message constructed from the ASCII keyboard of 128
symbols.
 Analog messages, on the other hand, are characterized by
signals whose values vary over a continuous range and are
defined for a continuous range of time.
 For example, the temperature or the atmospheric pressure
of a certain location over time can vary over a continuous
range and can assume an (uncountably) infinite number of
possible values.
 An analog message typically has a limited range of
amplitude and power. A digital message typically contains
M symbols and is called an M-ary message.
The Digital Revolution in Communications
 It is no secret to even a casual observer that every time one
looks at the latest electronic communication products,
another newer and better “digital technology” is displacing
the old analog technology.
 Between 1990 and 2015, cellular networks completed their
transformation from the first-generation analog AMPS to
the current third-generation (UMTS, CDMA2000) and
fourth-generation (i.e., 4G-LTE).
 Digital messages are transmitted as a finite set of electrical
waveforms. In other words, a digital message is generated
from a finite alphabet, while each character in the alphabet
can be represented by one waveform or a sequential
combination of such waveforms.
 For example, in sending messages via Morse code, a dash
can be transmitted by an electrical pulse of amplitude A and
a dot can be transmitted by a pulse of negative amplitude
−A (Fig. 1.3a).
 Consider a binary case: two symbols are encoded as
rectangular pulses of amplitudes A and −A. The only
decision at the receiver is to select between two possible
pulses received; the fine details of the pulse shape are not
an issue.
 A finite alphabet leads to noise and interference immunity.
The receiver’s decision can be made with reasonable
certainty even if the pulses have suffered from modest
distortion and noise (Fig. 1.3).
 The digital message in Fig. 1.3a is distorted by the channel,
as shown in Fig. 1.3b. Yet, if the distortion is not too large,
we can recover the data without error because we only need
to make a simple binary decision: Is the received pulse
positive or negative?
 Figure 1.3c shows the same data with channel distortion
and noise. Here again, the data can be recovered correctly
as long as the distortion and the noise are within limits.
Distortion-less Regeneration of Digital
Signals
 One main reason for the superior quality of digital systems
over analog ones is the viability of signal regeneration by
repeaters.
 When directly communicating over a long distance,
transmitted signals can be severely attenuated and
distorted.
 For digital pulse signals used in digital communications,
repeater nodes can be placed along the communication path
at distances short enough to ensure that noise and distortion
effects are minor such that digital pulses can be detected
with high accuracy.
 At each repeater or relay node, the incoming digital pulses
are detected such that new, “clean” pulses are regenerated
for transmission to the next node along the path.
 This process prevents the accumulation of noise and
distortion along the path by cleaning up the pulses at
regular path intervals.
 We can thus transmit messages over longer distances with
greater accuracy.
 There has been widespread application of distortion-less
regeneration by repeaters in long-haul communication
systems or by nodes in a large (possibly heterogeneous)
network.
 In analog systems, however, signals and noise within the
same bandwidth cannot be separated.
 Repeaters in analog systems are basically filters plus
amplifiers and are not “regenerative.” It is therefore
impossible to avoid in-band accumulation of noise and
distortion along the path.
 As a result, the distortion and the noise interference can
accumulate over the entire long-distance path as a signal
traverses through the network.
 To compound the problem, the signal is also attenuated
continuously over the transmission path. Thus, with
increasing distance the signal becomes weaker, whereas
more distortions and the noise accumulate to greater
strength.
 Amplification offers little help, since it enhances both the
signal and the noise equally. Consequently, the distance
over which an analog message can be successfully received
is limited by the first transmitter power.
 Despite these limitations, analog communication is simpler
and was used widely and successfully in the past for short-
to medium-range communications.
 In modern times, however, almost all new communication
systems being installed are digital, although a small
number of old analog communication technologies are still
in use, such as those for AM and FM radio broadcasting.
Analog-to-Digital (A/D) Conversion for Digital
Communications
 Despite the differences between analog and digital
messages, digital communication systems can carry analog
messages by first converting analog signals to digital
signals.
 A key device in electronics, the analog-to-digital (A/D)
converter, enables digital communication systems to
convey analog source signals such as audio and video.
 Generally, analog signals are continuous in time and in
range; that is, they have values at every time instant, and
their values can be anywhere within the range.
 On the other hand, digital signals exist only at discrete
points of time, and they can take on only finite values. A/D
conversion can never be 100% accurate.
 Fortunately, since human perception does not require
infinite accuracy, A/D conversion can effectively capture
necessary information from the analog source for digital
signal transmission.
 Two steps take place in A/D conversion: a continuous time
signal is first sampled into a discrete time signal, whose
continuous amplitude is then quantized into a discrete level
signal.
 First, the frequency spectrum of a signal indicates relative
strengths of various frequency components. The sampling
theorem states that if the highest frequency in the signal
spectrum is B (in hertz), the signal can be reconstructed
from its discrete samples, taken uniformly at a rate above
2B samples per second.
 This means that to preserve the information from a
continuous-time signal, we only need to transmit its
samples. However, the sample values are still not digital
because they lie in a continuous dynamic range.
 Here, the second step of quantization comes to the rescue.
Through quantization, each sample is approximated, or
“rounded off,” to the nearest quantized level.
 A quantizer partitions the signal range into L intervals.
Each sample amplitude is approximated by the midpoint of
the interval in which the sample value falls. Each sample is
now represented by one of the L numbers. The information
is thus digitized.
 Hence, after the two steps of sampling and quantizing, the
A/D conversion is completed. The quantized signal is an
approximation of the original one. We can improve the
accuracy of the quantized signal to any desired level by
increasing the number of levels L.
Pulse-Coded Modulation—A Digital
Representation
 Once the A/D conversion is over, the original analog
message is represented by a sequence of samples, each of
which takes on one of the L preset quantization levels.
 The transmission of this quantized sequence is the task of
digital communication systems. For this reason, signal
waveforms must be used to represent the quantized sample
sequence in the transmission process.
 Similarly, a digital storage device would also need to
represent the samples as signal waveforms. Pulse-coded
modulation (PCM) is a very simple and yet common
mechanism for this purpose.
 First, one information bit refers to one binary digit of 1 or
0. The idea of PCM is to represent each quantized sample
by an ordered combination of two basic pulses: p1(t)
representing 1 and p0(t) representing 0.
 Because each of the L possible sample values can be
written as a bit string of length log2 L, each sample can
therefore also be mapped into a short pulse sequence to
represent log2 L bits. For example, if L = 16, then, each
quantized level can be described uniquely by 4 bits.
 If we use two basic pulses p1(t) = A and p0(t) = −A,
respectively, to represent 1 and 0 for each bit, then a
sequence of four such pulses gives 2×2×2×2 = 16 distinct
patterns, as shown in Fig. 1.4. We can assign one pattern to
each of the 16 quantized values to be transmitted. Each
quantized sample is now coded into a sequence of four
binary pulses.
 This is the principle of PCM transmission, where signaling
is carried out by means of only two basic pulses (or
symbols).
 The binary case is of great practical importance because of
its simplicity and ease of detection. Much of today’s digital
communication is binary.∗
CHANNEL EFFECT, SIGNAL-TO-NOISE RATIO,
AND CAPACITY
In designing communication systems, it is vital to
understand and analyze important factors such as the
channel and signal characteristics, the relative noise
strength, the maximum number of bits that can be sent
over a channel per second, and, ultimately, the signal
quality.
Signal Bandwidth and Power
 In a given communication system, the fundamental
parameters and physical limitations that control the
connection’s rate and quality are the channel bandwidth B
and the signal power Ps.
 The bandwidth of a channel is the range of frequencies
that it can carry with reasonable fidelity. For example, if a
channel can carry with reasonable fidelity a signal whose
frequency components vary from 0 Hz (dc) up to a
maximum of 5000 Hz (5 kHz), the channel bandwidth B is
5 kHz.
 Likewise, each signal also has a bandwidth that measures
the maximum range of its frequency components. The
faster a signal changes, the higher its maximum frequency
is, and the larger its bandwidth is.
 A signal transmission is likely successful over a channel if
the channel bandwidth exceeds the signal bandwidth.
 The signal power Ps plays a dual role in information
transmission. First, Ps is related to the quality of
transmission. Increasing Ps strengthens the signal pulse and
suppresses the effect of channel noise and interference.
 In fact, the quality of either analog or digital
communication systems varies with the SNR. In any event,
a certain minimum SNR at the receiver is necessary for
successful communication.
 Thus, a larger signal power Ps allows the system to
maintain a minimum SNR over a longer distance, thereby
enabling successful communication over a longer span.
 The second role of the signal power is less obvious,
although equally important. From the information theory
point of view, the channel bandwidth B and the signal
power Ps are, to some extent, exchangeable; that is, to
maintain a given rate and accuracy of information
transmission, we can trade Ps for B, and vice versa.
 Thus, one may use less B if one is willing to increase Ps, or
one may reduce Ps if one is given bigger B.
 SNR is defined as the ratio of signal power to noise power.
Noise distorts the signal and accumulated along the path.
 It is normally measured in Decibel (dB), defined as 10
times the algorithm (to base 10) of the power ratio.

Eg.: SNR of 10, 100 and 1000 correspond to 10, 20,

dBm is a dB level using a 1mW reference.

 Solution
 The values of SNR and SNRdB can be calculated as
follows:
Example
 The loss in a cable is usually defined in decibels per
kilometer (dB/km). If the signal at the beginning of a cable
with −0.3 dB/km has a power of 2 mW, what is the power
of the signal at 5 km?
 Solution
 The loss in the cable in decibels is 5 × (−0.3) = −1.5 dB.
We can calculate the power as
Thanks………………