An Introduction To The Principles Of Digital Communication

The renowned communications theorist Robert Gallager brings his lucid writing style to the study of the fundamental system aspects of digital communication for a one-semester course for graduate students. With the clarity and insight that have characterized his teaching and earlier textbooks, he develops a simple framework and then combines this with careful proofs to help the reader understand modern systems and simplified models in an intuitive yet precise way. A strong narrative and links between theory and practice reinforce this concise, practical presentation. The book begins with data compression for arbitrary sources. Gallager then describes how to modulate the resulting binary data for transmission over wires, cables, optical fibers, and wireless channels. Analysis and intuitive interpretations are developed for channel noise models, followed by coverage of the principles of detection, coding, and decoding. The various concepts covered are brought together in a description of wireless communication, using CDMA as a case study.

Written by two distinguished experts in the field of digital communications, this classic text remains a vital resource three decades after its initial publication. Its treatment is geared toward advanced students of communications theory and to designers of channels, links, terminals, modems, or networks used to transmit and receive digital messages. The three-part approach begins with the fundamentals of digital communication and block coding, including an analysis of block code ensemble performance. The second part introduces convolutional coding, exploring ensemble performance and sequential decoding. The final section addresses source coding and rate distortion theory, examining fundamental concepts for memoryless sources as well as precepts related to memory, Gaussian sources, and universal coding. Appendixes of useful information appear throughout the text, and each chapter concludes with a set of problems, the solutions to which are available online.

A comprehensive text that takes a unique top-down approach to teaching the fundamentals of digital communication for a one-semester course.

Introduction to Digital Communications explores the basic principles in the analysis and design of digital communication systems, including design objectives, constraints and trade-offs. After portraying the big picture and laying the background material, this book lucidly progresses to a comprehensive and detailed discussion of all critical elements and key functions in digital communications. The first undergraduate-level textbook exclusively on digital communications, with a complete coverage of source and channel coding, modulation, and synchronization. Discusses major aspects of communication networks and multiuser communications Provides insightful descriptions and intuitive explanations of all complex concepts Focuses on practical applications and illustrative examples. A companion Web site includes solutions to end-of-chapter problems and computer exercises, lecture slides, and figures and tables from the text

This intuitive yet rigourous introduction derives the core results of digital communication from first principles. Theory, rather than industry standards, motivates the engineering approaches, and key results are stated with all the required assumptions. The book emphasizes the geometric view, opening with the inner product, the matched filter for its computation, Parseval's theorem, the sampling theorem as an orthonormal expansion, the isometry between passband signals and their baseband representation, and the spectral-efficiency optimality of quadrature amplitude modulation (QAM). Subsequent chapters address noise, hypothesis testing, Gaussian stochastic processes, and the sufficiency of the matched filter outputs. Uniquely, there is a treatment of white noise without generalized functions, and of the power spectral density without artificial random jitters and random phases in the analysis of QAM. This systematic and insightful book, with over 300 exercises, is ideal for graduate courses in digital communication, and for anyone asking 'why' and not just 'how'.