Prohibition: ELEC3503 Introduction to Digital Communications.

Offered: Semester 1

Classes: Two hours of lectures and a three hour lab and tutorial per week.

Assessment: Tutorial work 10%, laboratory 10%, in class quiz 10%, end of semester exam 70%.

This is an intermediate unit of study in telecommunications following on the general concepts studied in earlier units such as Signal and Systems and leading on to more advanced units such as Digital Communication Systems. Student will learn how to critically design and evaluate digital communication systems including the elements of a digital transmission system, understand the limitations of communications channels, different analog and digital modulation schemes and reasons to use digital techniques instead of analog, and the effect of noise and interference in performance of the digital communication systems. On completion of this unit, studentss will have sufficient knowledge of the physical channel of a telecommunications network to approach the study of higher layers of the network stack.

The following topics are covered. Introduction to communications systems, random signals and stochastic process, components, signals and channels, sampling, quantization, pulse amplitude modulation (PAM), pulse code modulation (PCM), quantization noise, time division multiplexing, delta modulation. Digital communications: baseband signals, digital PAM, eye diagram, equalization, correlative coding, error probabilities in baseband digital transmission, bandpass transmission, digital amplitude shift keying (ASK), frequency shift keying (FSK), phase shift keying (PSK) and quadrature shift keying (QPSK), error probabilities in bandpass digital transmission, a case study of digital communication systems. Introduction to information theory: fundamental limits in communications, channel capacity and channel coding, signal compression.

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