Digital Communications

The course aims to give to the student the basic techniques to understand, design and evaluate the main elements of a modern telecommunication system. In particolar, student should be able to: Design digital communication systems, given constraints on data rate, bandwidth, power, fidelity, and complexity; Analyze the performance of a digital communication link when additive noise is present in terms of the signal-to-noise ratio and bit error rate; Compute the power and bandwidth requirements of modern communication systems.

The course provides a basic understanding of the analysis and design of digital communication systems. Topics includes: principles of transmission; transmission over noisy channels; Modulation; Detection and probability of error for binary and M-ary signals (PAM, QAM, PSK etc.); Receiver design and sufficient statistics; the Nyquist criterion; Design trade-offs: rate, bandwidth, power and error probability; optimum reception in AWGN and band-limited AWGN channels; characterization of a wireless channel, wideband and narrowband fading.

Ernestina Cianca