ABSTRACT
This chapter examines some fundamental trade-offs among bandwidth, power, and error performance of digital communication systems. The design or definition of any digital communication system begins with a description of the communication link. The link is the name given to the communication transmission path from the modulator and transmitter, through the channel, and up to and including the receiver and demodulator. The chapter reviews fundamental relationships used in evaluating the performance of digital communication systems. It describes the concept of a link and a channel and examined a radio system from its transmitting segment up through the output of the receiving antenna. The chapter explores the concept of bandwidth-limited and power-limited systems and how such conditions influence the system design when the choices are confined to M-ary phase-shift keying and M-ary frequency shift keying modulation. It focuses on the definitions and computations involved in transforming from data bits to channel bits to symbols to chips.
