University of Illinois ECE ILLINOIS
ECE 361
DIGITAL COMMUNICATIONS
SPRING 2011
ECE 361 is a first course in digital communications: the basic technology that makes the information age possible. The currency of information is bits and we study how to reliably transfer this currency over an unreliable physical medium such as a wireline (telephone) channel or a wireless channel. The emphasis is on bit transmission from a single transmitter to a single receiver, and the important performance criteria are
- the data rate (the number of bits transmitted per second)
- the bit error rate, (the probability that a bit is incorrectly received)
- the energy transmitted per bit, (which together with the data rate determines the power requirements), and
- the bandwidth occupied by the transmitted signal
In our study, we shall consider statistical models for channels, transmission and reception (modulation and demodulation) strategies that take into account these channel models, and how the achievable data rates and the achievable bit error rates are affected by limitations on the key resources power and bandwidth that are available to the communications engineer.
In the first part of the course, we study communication over the additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN) channel which is the basic model that underlies the more complicated wireline and wireless channels. The second part of the course considers telephone channels, in which bandwidth constraints play a major role. Voiceband v.90 modem and DSL technologies are used as examples. Finally, we consider wireless channels in which power constraints play a major role, and the fluctuating received signal levels due to fading have to be dealt with appropriately. The GSM and 1xEV-DO standards are used as examples.
Prerequisites : ECE 210 and ECE 313
Instructor: Professor Dilip Sarwate
e-mail: sarwate AT illinois dot edu
Office Hours: Wednesdays 2 p.m. to 4 p.m. in 356 Everitt Laboratory
Text : There is no text for this course. Professor Viswanath's lecture notes are available for download on this page. Some old lecture notes from earlier versions of ECE 361 are also being made available. Some of this material is still relevant to the current version of ECE 361. Some newer lecture notes, more relevant to this semester's doings, will be posted now and then on this web page.
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