Electrical communications

That branch of electrical engineering dealing with the transmission and reception of information. Information can be transmitted over many different types of pathways, such as satellite channels, underwater acoustic channels, telephone cables, and fiber-optic links. Characteristically, any communications link is noisy. The receiver never receives the information-bearing waveform as it was originally transmitted. Rather, what is received is, at best, the sum of what was transmitted and noise. In reality, what is more likely to be received is a distorted version of what was transmitted, with noise and perhaps interference. Consequently, the design and implementation of a communications link are dependent upon statistical signal-processing techniques in order to provide the most efficient extraction of the desired information from the received waveform.

Broadly speaking, there are two basic classes of communication waveforms, those involving analog modulation and those involving digital modulation. The former type implies that the modulation process allows the actual information signal to modulate a high-frequency carrier for efficient transmission over a channel; this is achieved by using the continuum of amplitude values of an analog waveform. Examples of analog modulation systems include amplitude-modulation (AM) and frequency-modulation (FM) systems, as well as a variety of others such as single-sideband (SSB), double-sideband (DSB), and vestigial- sideband (VSB) systems. In digital modulation systems, the initial information-bearing waveform, assuming it's in analog form (such as voice or video), is first sampled, then quantized, and finally encoded in a digital format for carrier modulation and transmission over the channel.

In many communication systems, multiple sources and multiple destinations are present, and the manner in which accessing the channel is achieved becomes important. Perhaps the most common examples of such multiple-access links are those used by commercial radio and television stations. These systems operate by assigning to each transmitted waveform a distinct frequency band which is adjacent to but nominally not overlapping with its neighboring bands. In this way, there is approximately no interference among the various users. This type of operation, known as frequency-division multiple accessing (FDMA), can be used with either analog or digital modulation formats.

In many cases, the number of potential users is much greater than the number which can be simultaneously accommodated on the channel. However, if the percentage of time employed by each user is statistically very small, the users can compete for access to the channel. When a given user has a message ready for transmission, most of the time a vacant slot on the channel will be found, allowing data transmission. However, at times, all available slots on the channel are taken, and the user has to delay sending the message.

Systems that operate in this manner are referred to as random- access systems, and are typical of computer communication net works. Depending on the geographical size of such networks, they have come to have their own specialized names. For ex ample, they are known as local-area networks (LANs) if they are concentrated over an area roughly the size of a few blocks or less. If the terminals which are farthest apart are within a few miles of one another, they are referred to as metropolitan-area networks (MANs). Networks that span still larger geographical distances are called wide-area networks (WANs).

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