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Module

EEE8104 : Digital Communications (Inactive)

  • Inactive for Year: 2024/25
  • Module Leader(s): Dr Stephane Le Goff
  • Owning School: Engineering
  • Teaching Location: Newcastle City Campus
Semesters

Your programme is made up of credits, the total differs on programme to programme.

Semester 2 Credit Value: 10
ECTS Credits: 5.0
European Credit Transfer System

Aims

To ensure students have a sound knowledge of the fundamental concepts of information theory and its application to the detection and/or correction of transmission errors in communication systems.

To provide students with a thorough understanding of the coding techniques used to detect and/or correct errors in today’s communication systems.

Outline Of Syllabus

Part 1 - Shannon theory: entropy, joint entropy, mutual information, binary symmetric channel (BSC), binary phase shift keying (BSPK), additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN) channel, channel capacity, channel coding theorem, BSC and BPSK, AWGN channel capacities.

Part 2 - Theory of error-control codes: types of codes, coding rate, Hamming distance, error-correction power, linear block codes, systematic codes, maximum-likelihood decoding for the BSC (hard-decision decoding) and the BPSK, AWGN channel (soft-decision decoding), bit error probability after decoding, union bound, asymptotic coding gain, error coefficients, examples of toy linear block codes (repetition code, parity-check code, (7, 4) Hamming code).

Part 3 - Practical error-control codes: Hamming codes, BCH codes, Reed-Solomon codes, convolutional codes, Viterbi’s decoding algorithm for convolutional codes, union bound for convolutional codes, concatenated codes, turbo codes, maximum a posteriori (MAP) algorithm, iterative decoding of turbo codes, union bound for turbo codes, LDPC codes, Tanner graph, iterative decoding of LDPC codes.

Part 4 - Bandwidth-efficient error-correcting codes: Bit-interleaved coded modulation (BICM) and trellis-coded modulation (TCM).

Teaching Methods

Teaching Activities
Category Activity Number Length Student Hours Comment
Guided Independent StudyAssessment preparation and completion240:3012:00Revision for final exam
Guided Independent StudyAssessment preparation and completion12:002:00Final exam
Scheduled Learning And Teaching ActivitiesLecture122:0024:00N/A
Guided Independent StudyIndependent study162:0062:00Reviewing lecture notes; general reading
Total100:00
Teaching Rationale And Relationship

Learning outcomes are achieved in lectures where students are introduced to the theory of advanced communications.

Assessment Methods

The format of resits will be determined by the Board of Examiners

Exams
Description Length Semester When Set Percentage Comment
Written Examination1202A100N/A
Assessment Rationale And Relationship

The theoretical concepts introduced in the lectures are assessed via written exam using practice-oriented questions.

Reading Lists

Timetable