Unit of Study Outline

ELEC3505 Communications

Semester 1, March 2008

Instructor: Dr Abbas Jamalipour, Room 732, Bldg. J03, Email: abbas at ee dot usyd dot edu dot au

Tutor: Mr, Fan Bai, Room 730, Email: fan at ee dot usyd dot edu dot au

Lab Demonstrators: Mr. Farshad Javadi, Room 730, Email: farshad at ee dot usyd dot edu dot au

Mr. Yaozhou Ma, Room 730, Email: yaozhou at ee dot usyd dot edu dot au

Classes:

Lectures: Mondays 11am – 1pm, Lecture Theatre 351, Bldg. J03 (EEB)

Tutorials: Fridays 2pm – 5pm, Room 620, Bldg. J03 (EEB)

Labs: Mondays 2pm – 5pm, Room 417, Bldg. J03 (EEB)

Supporting Web Page: http://www.ee.usyd.edu.au/~abbas/courses/E3505/

Text and Course Materials:

Main Text:

Communication Systems, 4th Edition, S. Haykin, John Wiley & Sons, Inc., New York, 2001

Other suggested books in this area:

Digital Communications, 2nd Edition, I. Glover and P. Grant, Pearson/Prentice Hall Publishers, 2004

Communication Systems, 3/e or 4/e, B. Carlson, McGraw-Hill

Signal and Systems, M. Roberts, McGraw-Hill, 2004.

Modern Wireless Communications, Haykin and Moher, 2005, Pearson International

Modern Digital and Analog Communication Systems, B. P. Lathi, Oxford University Press, 3rd Edition, 1998

Digital Communications, Fundamental & Applications 2/e, B. Sklar, Prentice Hall

An Introduction to Digital Communications, Kurzweil, 2000, Wiley

Communication Systems Engineering, Proakis and Salehi, Prentice Hall

Lecture Notes are available here to the enrolled students.

Assumed Background:

Confidence in mathematical operation usually needed to handle telecommunications problems such as Fourier transform, fundamental in signals and systems theory, convolution, and similar techniques.

Syllabus: Introduction to communications systems, 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.

Learning Outcomes: 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, students will have sufficient knowledge of the physical channel of a telecommunications network to approach the study of higher layers of the network stack.

Graduate Attributes: Through lectures, tutorials, and labs students will become able to:

1. Develop knowledge in the area of digital communications

2. Apply this knowledge to real situations and understand the merits and limitations of specific communication systems

3. Have the ability to use appropriate technology to develop communication systems addressing specific needs

Through assessment and assignments, students will become able to:

1. Exercise critical judgment in designing digital communication systems

2. Develop skills in rigorous, independent and creative thinking

3. Develop problem solving skills and account for their decisions

Teaching and Learning Approach: The unit consists of lectures that provide theoretical background for digital communications, tutorials that provide the opportunity for students to practice and apply the mathematical theories using particular problems and to understand the theory better, and the labs, which include both simulation and hardware implementation of digital communications systems. It is expected that at the end of this unit the students will be able to understand and work with digital communications systems.

Workload requirements:

1. Contact Hours: 2 hours lecture and 3-hour session of lab and/or tutorial per week

2. Students are expected to spend at least 4 hours/wk besides tutorials, labs, and lectures

Assessments and Examinations:

1. Group lab reports: 10%

2. Individual tutorial attendance report: 5%

- Checked by a short report submission on the day

3. Mid-semester exam: 15%

- One mid-semester exam during lecture hours on Monday 5 May 2008*

- This exam is for you to study and bring your knowledge up to date and to find out the format and difficulty of the final exam.

4. Final Exam 70%

- An open book 2-hour exam

- Basically similar format as used in mid-semester exam

*Subject to change during semester

Contents:

• Background and Preview: An Introduction to Communications Systems
• Continuous-Wave Modulation
• Pulse Modulation
• Baseband Pulse Transmission
• Signal-Space Analysis
• Passband Digital Transmission
• Fundamental Limits in Information Theory

Lectures:

• Materials for this unit of study are taken from your main text and several other textbooks and are organized so that they provide a complete introductory course on communications systems for students.
• You may read other references provided in this note if you feel that you understand their method better. Students should find their most appropriate way and text in learning the topics discussed in this unit, as there are several ways to learn communications and many texts are available.
• A set of slides used by the lecturer will be provided to you. Try to attend lectures and add your own notes to them. Having them in original form and the textbook could not complete your knowledge to pass the unit.

Lab Experiments*:

• Lab 1: Amplitude and Frequency Modulation (AM/FM)
• Lab 2: Line Codes
• Lab 3: PCM Encoding and Decoding
• Lab 4: Pulse-Amplitude Modulation (PAM) and Time-Division Multiplexing (TDM)

*Subject to change during semester

For information about lab experiments and reporting, click here.

Tutorials:

• You will have a set of questions for each tutorial session. It is recommended that you try to solve those questions before going to the tutorial session.
• A short report for each tutorial session will be collected by the tutor on the day. The content will not be marked but it will be used to check the attendance. It is however suggested that you try to write your answers in that report.
• The tutor will go through questions and give you the answers. If you just come to the session without any preparation, it won’t be useful at all. Remember that it is in nature of a Communications course that the theory taught in lectures cannot guarantee solving tutorial problems. So lectures and tutorials are complementing one another, don’t miss either of them.

Note:

• The complete set of tutorial questions is available in electronic format here.

Consultation Time:

• Wednesdays 1pm-2pm or by appointment otherwise

How to be successful in this course?

• Attend the lectures, labs, and tutorials
• Try to solve tutorial questions by yourself
• Lectures give you fundamental theories; to pass this unit you need to improve your problem solving skill by
• Attempt as many problems as you can (from your text and other reading materials)
• Try to connect the theory and the mathematics required to solve problems
• You will find solving mathematical communications problems completely different from the lectures, so
• Try to familiarize with math as early as possible
• Lectures and tutorial hours are limited, you need to do this mostly by yourself
• Don’t wait until the final exam!

Weekly Schedule

(Lecture contents are tentative depends on actual progress of lectures each week)

week	Lectures (planned, contents may change)	Tutorials	Labs
1 (3/3)	0. Introduction to the Unit of Study 1. Introduction Elements of communications systems, communication resources, source of information, noise
2 (10/3)	Communication networks, communications channels, modulation process, analog and digital communications, Shannon’s information capacity theorem, Examples
3 (17/3)	2. Continuous-Wave Modulation Introduction to CWM, Amplitude modulation, linear modulation, DSB-SC modulation, Coherent detection, Quadrature carrier multiplexing		Lab 1A
4 (31/3)	Single-sideband modulation, Vestigial sideband modulation, Frequency translation, FDM, angle modulation	Tutorial 1
5 (7/4)	FM, narrowband and wideband FM, nonlinear effects in FM noise in CWM, noise in AM and FM receivers		Lab 1B
6 (14/4)	3. Pulse Modulation Sampling process and sampling theorem, PAM, BW-noise trade-off, Quantization process	Tutorial 2
7 (21/4)	PCM, noise in PCM, TDM, digital multiplexers		Lab 2
8 (28/4)	Delta modulation, linear prediction, differential PCM, adaptive differential PCM	Tutorial 3
9 (5/5)	4. Baseband Pulse Transmission Matched filter, error rate due to noise, intersymbol interference Mid-semester Exam
10 (12/5)	Nyquist’s criterion, baseband M-ary PAM, DSL, optimum linear receiver, adaptive equalization	Tutorial 4	Lab 3
11 (19/5)	5. Signal-Space Analysis Geometric representation of signals, vector channel conversion, Likelihood functions, Coherent detection of signals in noise, correlation receiver, probability of error	Tutorial 5
12 (26/5)	6. Passband Digital Transmission Passband transmission model, coherent PSK, hybrid ASK/PSK, coherent FSK, Unknown phase signal detection, non-coherent orthogonal modulation, non-coherent binary FSK	Tutorial 6	Lab 4
13 (2/6)	Differential PSK, comparison between different digital modulation schemes, voice-band modems, multi-channel modulation, synchronization