Contemporary Digital and Data Communications

Digital and data communications are creating broad new technical and business opportunities, and this comprehensive, applications-oriented course provides a rigorous introduction to digital communications principles. Students examine protocols and communications standards, including ISDN, FDDI, Ethernet, X.25, SONET and frame relay; as well as ATM cell structure, headers, payload and ATM for broadband systems. The course also investigates communications concepts that include modulation (PSK, ASK, FSK, QAM.GMSK, etc.), channel coding (convolutional, turbo, etc.), encryption, TV compression, HDTV and spread-spectrum. Topics include Internet communications, TCP/IP protocol, routers and switches; wireless cellular telephone communications; satellite vs. fiber-optic communications; Internet access via ADSL, cable modems and wireless communications; LANs, MANs and WANs; utilization of digital signal processing methods for communications, signals and noise; sampling; information content; channel capacity; BER; link closure; synchronization; and multiplexing/demultiplexing; as well as communications simulation techniques/software to analyze communications systems. The instructor in this course will demonstrate the use of Matlab and other software tools for analysis, simulation and problem solving. These tools are provided as part of the course fee as an option for student use and will not be part of the course grading criteria.