Digital Communication Modulation, Coding, and Information Theory

The modern era of digital communication dates to Claude Shannon’s three seminal papers appearing in 1948 and 1949 in the Bell System Technical Journal. Digital communication advanced rapidly in the following years and generated a large number of technologies, including cell phones, Wi-Fi, fiber optic communication, MP3 players, JPEG-encoded photographs, high-definition television (HDTV), etc. With increasing demands for remote and high-speed digital access to data and real-time video, advances are likely to continue for the foreseeable future. The topics covered in this book constitute a “first course” on digital communication because with a few exceptions, primarily related to the multipath propagation effects and fading, only the point-to-point additive white Gaussian noise channel is considered. This was one of the first channels to be seriously studied in the modern era of digital communication that began with Shannon. From a practical perspective, modulation and coding for the deep-space channel motivated much of the early work in this field. The material covered in this textbook is still widely used and forms the basis for subsequent and ongoing advancements in the field. Broadly speaking, the fundamentals covered in this textbook are the notion of information, entropy, lossless data compression, error-correcting methods in the presence of noise, the fundamental limits of reliable communication, channel capacity, optimum decision theory and optimum receiver principals, common modulation types, the relationship between bandwidth and dimensionality, system performance using modulation and coding, and the fundamental trade-off between energy-efficiency and bandwidth-efficiency.