The renowned communications theorist Robert Gallager brings his lucid writing style to the study of the fundamental system aspects of digital communication for a one-semester course for graduate students. With the clarity and insight that have characterized his teaching and earlier textbooks, he develops a simple framework and then combines this with careful proofs to help the reader understand modern systems and simplified models in an intuitive yet precise way. A strong narrative and links between theory and practice reinforce this concise, practical presentation. The book begins with data compression for arbitrary sources. Gallager then describes how to modulate the resulting binary data for transmission over wires, cables, optical fibers, and wireless channels. Analysis and intuitive interpretations are developed for channel noise models, followed by coverage of the principles of detection, coding, and decoding. The various concepts covered are brought together in a description of wireless communication, using CDMA as a case study.

Principles of Digital Transmission is designed for advanced undergraduate and graduate level students and professions in telecommunications. Teachers and learners can mix and match chapters to create four distinct courses: (1) a one-term basic course in digital communications; (2) a one-term course in advanced digital communications; (3) a one-term course in information theory and coding; (4) a two-term course sequence in digital communications and coding. The book provides rigorous mathematical tools for the analysis and design of digital transmission systems. The authors emphasize methodology in their aim to teach the reader how to do it rather than how it is done. They apply the fundamental tools of the discipline onto a number of systems, such as wireless data transmission systems.

A comprehensive text that takes a unique top-down approach to teaching the fundamentals of digital communication for a one-semester course.

Digital Transmission – A Simulation-Aided Introduction with VisSim/Comm is a book in which basic principles of digital communication, mainly pertaining to the physical layer, are emphasized. Nevertheless, these principles can serve as the fundamentals that will help the reader to understand more advanced topics and the associated technology. In this book, each topic is addressed in two different and complementary ways: theoretically and by simulation. The theoretical approach encompasses common subjects covering principles of digital transmission, like notions of probability and stochastic processes, signals and systems, baseband and passband signaling, signal-space representation, spread spectrum, multi-carrier and ultra wideband transmission, carrier and symbol-timing recovery, information theory and error-correcting codes. The simulation approach revisits the same subjects, focusing on the capabilities of the communication system simulation software VisSim/Comm on helping the reader to fulfill the gap between the theory and its practical meaning. The presentation of the theory is made easier with the help of 357 illustrations. A total of 101 simulation files supplied in the accompanying CD support the simulation-oriented approach. A full evaluation version and a viewer-only version of VisSim/Comm are also supplied in the CD.

Written by two distinguished experts in the field of digital communications, this classic text remains a vital resource three decades after its initial publication. Its treatment is geared toward advanced students of communications theory and to designers of channels, links, terminals, modems, or networks used to transmit and receive digital messages. The three-part approach begins with the fundamentals of digital communication and block coding, including an analysis of block code ensemble performance. The second part introduces convolutional coding, exploring ensemble performance and sequential decoding. The final section addresses source coding and rate distortion theory, examining fundamental concepts for memoryless sources as well as precepts related to memory, Gaussian sources, and universal coding. Appendixes of useful information appear throughout the text, and each chapter concludes with a set of problems, the solutions to which are available online.