Digital Communication, 5 op

Core content

• Synchronization basics
  - concepts of time, phase and frequency synchronization in digital communications receivers
  -some basic algorithms to acquire synch
• Information Theoretic Foundation of Electical Communication:
  - Information, entropy, and mutual information;
  - Maximal mutual information and channel capacity;
  - Source coding vs. channel coding.
  - Capacity of frequency-selective and fading channels
• Baseband and Bandpass Digital Communication:
  - Bits, symbols, and waveforms;
  - Baseband pulse amplitude modulation (PAM), Nyquist pulse-shaping, line coding;
  - Linear I/Q modulation, real and complex symbol alphabets;
  - Digital frequency modulation techniques.
  
• Performance of Digital Communication Chains:
  - Effects of additive noise, symbol & bit errors and their probability, Gray mapping;
  - Spectral efficiency and related concepts, connections to channel capacity theorem.
  - Effects of fading on the symbol and bit errors
  
• Detection Theory and Intersymbol Interference (ISI) Mitigation:
  - Basics of statistical decision making and detection, maximum likelihood (ML) and maximum a posteriori (MAP) principles;
  - Signal space concepts and connection to practical waveforms, sufficient statistics;
  - Detection of single symbols, matched filtering (MF);
  - Detection of symbol sequences;
  - Optimal receiver front-end, signal space arguments, intersymbol interference (ISI);
  - Zero-forcing (ZF), mean-squared error (MSE) and other optimization principles;
  - ML sequence detection and Viterbi algorithm;
  - Channel equalization, linear vs. nonlinear equalizers, adaptive techniques.
• Error Control Coding in Digital Communication Systems:
  - Error detection vs. correction vs. prevention, redundancy;
  - Hard and soft decoding, coding gain;
  - Block codes and convolutional codes,
  Viterbi decoding;
  - Coded modulation and trellis codes;
  - Interleaving, puncturing.
  - Basic ideas and application of Turbo codes, LDPC codes and Polar codes.
  

Complementary knowledge

• - Basics of partial response (PR) signaling
  - Scrambling
  - Carrier and symbol timing recovery (synchronization)
• - Various adaptive filtering algorithms and their relative performance; convergence properties and other essential characteristics