OVERVIEW

Presentation of the main base-band band-pass digital communication systems. Furthermore, the course provides the basics of Information Theory applied to channel coding.

AIMS AND CONTENT

LEARNING OUTCOMES

The course is aimed at providing the bases of digital communications: the baseband and bandpass transmissions will be presented and discussed, as well as the main channel coding techniques. The goal is to give the students an adequate knowledge needed to understand the key elements for designing and developing modern telecommunication systems.

LEARNING OUTCOMES (FURTHER INFO)

The course provides the basic theoretical elements and describes various available technological solutions suitable to design, implement, and evaluate modern digital transmission systems, with emphasis on the most used techniques for lowpass and bandpass channels. The problems related to flow synchronization will be discussed and the basics of information theory applied to channel coding will be given.

TEACHING METHODS

Traditional lectures (100 hours) + about 20 hours of exercises carried out in classroom

SYLLABUS/CONTENT

• General concepts: analog and digital messages. Scheme of a digital communication system. Digital transmission over baseband channels: PAM. Intersymbol interference: Nyquist criterion. PAM power spectrum. Main line codes and their spectra. PAM optimum receivers.

• -  Bit and frame synchronization: basic techniques.

• -  Digital transmission over bandpass channels: OOK, ASK, FSK, CPFSK, PSK and their power spectra. Noise equivalent bandwidth. Synthesis of modulators by means of QAM systems.

• -  Coherent reception for binary bandpass systems: optimal receivers for OOK, FSK, PRK. Noncoherent OOK, FSK, DPSK receivers: performance (error probability) evaluation. Bandpass M-ary QAM, APK and PSK receivers, performance evaluation. Link budget in digital transmission systems.

• -  Digitization techniques for analog signals. Analog-to-digital conversion: Nyquist criterion. PCM generation and reconstruction. Quantization noise. Decoding noise. Delta modulation and differential PCM.

• -  Basics of information theory and source coding. Channel coding, Shannon's fundamental theorem. Parity check codes, cyclic codes. Convolutional codes: convolutional encoding and decoding.

RECOMMENDED READING/BIBLIOGRAPHY

A. B. Carlson, P. B. Crilly, J. C. Rutledge, “Communication Systems”, 4th edition,  Mac Graw Hill, 2002

B. Sklar “Digital Communications: Fundamentals and Applications”, Prentice Hall 2001

Handouts by the teacher

TEACHERS AND EXAM BOARD

Exam Board

SANDRO ZAPPATORE (President)

ALDO GRATTAROLA

LESSONS

LESSONS START

I semester (approx. from Sept. 21 to Dec. 18) and II semester (approx. from Feb. 22 to May 27).

For more details, see the timetable edited by the "Scuola Politecnica"

Class schedule

The timetable for this course is available here: Portale EasyAcademy

EXAMS

EXAM DESCRIPTION

Written + oral

ASSESSMENT METHODS

There are two classworks during the year (reserved for the students who were actually attending the lectures during the year). The final is written, followed by a short oral. Only the oral is requested to students that got an enough high score in the classworks.

Exam schedule