Digital Communications 1

Preface

Humans have always used communication systems: in the past, native Americans used clouds of smoke, then Chappe invented his telegraph and Edison the telephone, which has deeply changed our lifestyle. Nowadays, smartphones enable us to make calls, watch videos and communicate on social networks. The future will see the emergence of the connected man and wider applications of smart objects. All current and future communication systems rely on a digital communication chain that consists of a source and a destination separated by a transmission channel, which may be a portion of a cable, an optical fiber, a wireless mobile or satellite channel. Whichever the channel, the processing blocks implemented in the communication chain have the same basis. This book aims at detailing them, across two volumes:

• – the first volume deals with source coding and channel coding. After a presentation of the fundamental results of information theory, the different lossless and lossly source coding techniques are studied. Then, error-correcting-codes (block codes, convolutional codes and concatenated codes) are theoretically detailed and their applications provided;
• – the second volume concerns the blocks located after channel coding in the communication chain. It first presents baseband and sine waveform transmissions. Then, the different steps required at the receiver to perform detection, namely synchronization and channel estimation, are studied. Two variants of these blocks which are used ...