Digital

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

For other uses, see Digital (disambiguation).

A digital system[1] is a data technology that uses discrete (discontinuous) values. By contrast, non-digital (or analog) systems use

a continuous range of values to represent information. Although digital representations are discrete, the information represented can be

either discrete, such as numbers, letters or icons, or continuous, such as sounds, images, and other measurements of continuous systems.

The word digital comes from the same source as the word digit and digitus (the Latin word for finger), as fingers are used for discrete

counting. It is most commonly used incomputing and electronics, especially where real-world information is converted to a digital format as

in digital audio and digital photography.

Sending and receiving data via cables (e.g., telephone lines or fibre optics) or wireless relay systems.
Because ordinary telephone circuits pass signals that fall within the frequency range of voice
communication (about 300 – 3,500 hertz), the high frequencies associated with data transmission suffer
a loss of amplitude and transmission speed. Data signals must therefore be translated into a format
compatible with the signals used in telephone lines. Digital computers use a modem to transform
outgoing digital electronic data; a similar system at the receiving end translates the incoming signal
back to the original electronic data. Specialized data-transmission links carry signals at frequencies
higher than those used by the public telephone network.

In the design of large and complex digital systems, it is often necessary to have one device communicate digital information to and from other devices.

One advantage of digital information is that it tends to be far more resistant to transmitted and interpreted errors than information symbolized in an

analog medium. This accounts for the clarity of digitally-encoded telephone connections, compact audio disks, and for much of the enthusiasm in the

engineering community for digital communications technology. However, digital communication has its own unique pitfalls, and there are multitudes of

different and incompatible ways in which it can be sent. Hopefully, this chapter will enlighten you as to the basics of digital communication, its

advantages, disadvantages, and practical considerations.

Read more: http://www.answers.com/topic/data-transmission#ixzz1JrP8v6LI

Contents

 [hide]

1 Digital noise

2 Symbol to digital

conversion

3 Properties of digital

information

4 Historical digital systems

 5 See also

6 References

What are advantages of digital

communications?
In: Electronics Engineering [Edit categories]

[Improve]
1.Circutary becomes simpler than AC. 
2.Highly resistive to noise as we are dealing with binary digits.
3.Highly secure.
4.Can travel long distances and can store data for long time.
5.AS we have regenerative repeaters & reconstruction filters in the receiver section we can extract original signal transmitted
6. Error correcting and detecting is easy.
7. A comman format is used for different kind of message signal such as speech signal and video signal.
8. Flexibility in configuring digital communication. digital hardware implimentation is flexible and permit the use of LSI. microprocessors anmd digital switches.

Read more: http://wiki.answers.com/Q/What_are_advantages_of_digital_communications#ixzz1JrPPIbdU

[edit]Digital noise

When data is transmitted, or indeed handled at all, a certain amount of noise enters into the signal. Noise can have several causes: data

transmitted wirelessly, such as byradio, may be received inaccurately, suffer interference from other wireless sources, or pick up background

noise from the rest of the universe. Microphones pick up both the intended signal as well as background noise without discriminating

between signal and noise, so when audio is encoded digitally, it typically already includes noise.

Electric pulses transmitted via wires are typically attenuated by the resistance of the wire, and changed by its capacitance or inductance.

Temperature variations can increase or reduce these effects. While digital transmissions are also degraded, slight variations do not matter

since they are ignored when the signal is received. With an analog signal, variances cannot be distinguished from the signal and so provide

a kind of distortion. In a digital signal, similar variances will not matter, as any signal close enough to a particular value will be interpreted as

that value. Care must be taken to avoid noise and distortion when connecting digital and analog systems, but more when using analog

systems.
[edit]

Properties of digital information

All digital information possesses common properties that distinguish it from analog communications methods:

 Synchronization: Since digital information is conveyed by the sequence in which symbols are

ordered, all digital schemes have some method for determining the beginning of a sequence. In written or
spoken human languages synchronization is typically provided by pauses (spaces), capitalization, and
punctuation. Machine communications typically use special synchronization sequences.

 Language: All digital communications require a language, which in this context consists of all the
information that the sender and receiver of the digital communication must both possess, in advance, in
order for the communication to be successful. Languages are generally arbitrary and specify the meaning
 to be assigned to particular symbol sequences, the allowed range of values, methods to be used for
synchronization, etc.

 Errors: Disturbances (noise) in analog communications invariably introduce some, generally small

deviation or error between the intended and actual communication. Disturbances in a digital
communication do not result in errors unless the disturbance is so large as to result in a symbol being
misinterpreted as another symbol or disturb the sequence of symbols. It is therefore generally possible to
have an entirely error-free digital communication. Further, techniques such as check codes may be used to
detect errors and guarantee error-free communications through redundancy or retransmission. Errors in
digital communications can take the form of substitution errors in which a symbol is replaced by another
symbol, or insertion/deletion errors in which an extra incorrect symbol is inserted into or deleted from a
digital message. Uncorrected errors in digital communications have unpredictable and generally large
impact on the information content of the communication.

 Copying: Because of the inevitable presence of noise, making many successive copies of an analog
communication is infeasible because each generation increases the noise. Because digital
communications are generally error-free, copies of copies can be made indefinitely.

 Granularity: When a continuously variable analog value is represented in digital form there is always
a decision as to the number of symbols to be assigned to that value. The number of symbols determines
the precision or resolution of the resulting datum. The difference between the actual analog value and the
digital representation is known as quantization error. Example: the actual temperature is 23.234456544453
degrees but if only two digits (23) are assigned to this parameter in a particular digital representation (e.g.
digital thermometer or table in a printed report) the quantizing error is: 0.234456544453. This property of
digital communication is known asgranularity.
[edit]

Noise
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

This article is about noise as an unwanted phenomenon. For other uses, see Noise (disambiguation).
NASA researchers at Glenn Research Center conducting tests on aircraft engine noise in 1967

In common use, the word noise means any unwanted sound. In both analog and digital electronics, noise is an unwanted perturbation to a wanted signal; it is called noise as a

generalisation of the audible noise heard when listening to a weak radiotransmission. Signal noise is heard as acoustic noise if played through a loudspeaker; it manifests as

'snow' on a television orvideo image. Noise can block, distort, change or interfere with the meaning of a message in human, animal and electronic communication.

In signal processing or computing it can be considered unwanted data without meaning; that is, data that is not being used to transmit a signal, but is simply produced as an

unwanted by-product of other activities. "Signal-to-noise ratio" is sometimes used informally to refer to the ratio of useful information to false or irrelevant data in a conversation

or exchange, such as off-topic posts and spam in online discussion forums and other online communities. In information theory, however, noise is still considered to

be information.[citation needed] In a broader sense, film grain or even advertisements encountered while looking for something else can be considered noise. In biology, noise can

describe the variability of a measurement around the mean, for example transcriptional noise describes the variability in gene activity between cells in a population.

In many of these areas, the special case of thermal noise arises, which sets a fundamental lower limit to what can be measured or signaled and is related to basic physical

processes at the molecular level described by well-establishedthermodynamics considerations, some of which are expressible by simple formulae.

Contents

 [hide]

1 Subjective

distinctions

2 Acoustic noise

3 Regulation of acoustic

noise

4 Acoustic noise in film

sound
 5 Audio noise

6 Non-acoustic noise

o 6.1 Elect

ronic noise

o 6.2 Visua

l noise

o 6.3 Vibra

tional noise

o 6.4 Noisy

genes

7 See also

8 References

9 Further reading

10 External links

[edit]Subjective distinctions

Calling some signal or sound noise is often a subjective distinction. One person's maximum-volume music listening pleasure might be another's unbearable noise.

[edit]Acoustic noise

When speaking of noise in relation to sound, what is commonly meant is meaningless sound of greater than usual volume. Thus, a loud activity may be referred to as noisy.

However, conversations of other people may be called noise for people not involved in any of them, and noise can be any unwanted sound such as the noise of dogs barking,

neighbours playing loud music, road traffic sounds, chainsaws, or aircraft, spoiling the quiet of the countryside.

Acoustic noise can be anything from low-level but annoying to loud and harmful. At one extreme users of public transport sometimes complain about the faint and tinny sounds

emanating from the headphones or earbuds of somebody listening to a portable audio player; at the other the sound of very loud music, a jet engine at close quarters, etc. can

cause permanent irreversible hearing damage.

[edit]Regulation of acoustic noise

Main article: Noise regulation

Noise regulation includes statutes or guidelines relating to sound transmission established by national, state or provincial and municipal levels of government. After a watershed

passage of the U.S. Noise Control Act of 1972[1], the program was abandoned at the federal level, under President Ronald Reagan, in 1981 and the issue was left to local and

state governments. Although the UK and Japan enacted national laws in 1960 and 1967 respectively, these laws were not at all comprehensive or fully enforceable as to

address (a) generally rising ambient noise (b) enforceable numerical source limits on aircraft and motor vehicles or (c) comprehensive directives to local government.

[edit]Acoustic noise in film sound

For film sound theorists and practitioners at the advent of talkies c.1928/1929, noise was non-speech sound or natural sound, and for many of them, noise (especially

asynchronous use with image) was desired over the evils of dialogue synchronized to moving image. The director and critic René Clair writing in 1929 makes a clear distinction

between film dialogue and film noise and very clearly suggests that noise can have meaning and be interpreted: "...it is possible that an interpretation of noises may have more

of a future in it. Sound cartoons, using "real" noises, seem to point to interesting possibilities" ('The Art of Sound' (1929)). Alberto Cavalcanti uses noise as a synonym for natural

sound ('Sound in Films' (1939)) and as late as 1960, Siegfried Kracauer was referring to noise as non-speech sound ('Dialogue and Sound' (1960)).

[edit]Audio noise

White Noise

Problems listening to this

file? See  media help.

Main article: Colors of noise

In audio, recording, and broadcast systems audio noise refers to the residual low level sound (usually hiss and hum) that is heard in quiet periods of programme.

In audio engineering it can also refer to the unwanted residual electronic noise signal that gives rise to acoustic noise heard as "hiss". This signal noise is commonly measured

using A-weighting or ITU-R 468 weighting

[edit]Non-acoustic noise

[edit]Electronic noise

Main article: Noise (electronics)

Electronic noise exists in all circuits and devices as a result of thermal noise, also referred to as Johnson Noise. It is caused by random variations in current or voltagecaused by

the random movement of charge carriers (usually electrons) carrying the current as they are jolted around by thermal energy. Thermal noise can be reduced by reducing the

temperature of the circuit. This phenomenon limits the minimum signal level that any radio receiver can usefully respond to, because there will always be a small but significant

amount of thermal noise arising in its input circuits. This is why radio telescopes, which search for very low levels of signal from space, use front-end low-noise amplifier circuits

cooled with liquid nitrogen.

There are several other sources of noise in electronic circuits such as shot noise, seen in very low-level signals where the finite number of energy-carrying particles becomes

significant, or flicker noise (1/f noise) in semiconductor devices.

[edit]Visual noise

Main article: Image noise

Noise is also present in images. Electronic noise will be present in camera sensors, and the physical size of the grains of film emulsion creates visual noise. This kind of noise is

referred to as "grain."
Noise is also used in the creation of 2D and 3D images by computer. Sometimes noise is added to images to hide the sudden transitions inherent in digital representation of

color, known as "banding". This adding of noise is referred to as "dithering." Sometimes noise is used to create the subject matter itself. Procedural noise (such as Perlin noise)

is often used to create natural-looking variation in computer generated images.

[edit]Vibrational noise

Main article: Ambient Vibrations

The Earth ground and the built environment are subjected to permanent vibrations commonly referred to as seismic noise but nowadays preferably called Ambient Vibrations.

These vibrations have natural (ocean waves, wind...) and anthropogenic (traffic, machines...) origins depending on the considered frequency range. These vibrations may be

disturbing for people (housing close to railway tracks...) and even cause solidian noise (acoustic noise created by particular vibrations of solids like rooms) but they are also

used (recorded) to characterize the structures (civil engineering structure, underground) they are shaking in terms of dynamic properties and eventually physical properties.

[edit]Noisy genes

Main article: Transcriptional noise

The activity and regulation of our genes are also subject to noise. Transcriptional noise refers to the variability in gene activity between cells in genetically identical populations

(even identical twins are non-identical). Noise in gene activity has tremendous consequences on cell behaviour, and must be mitigated or integrated. Noise impacts upon the

effectiveness of clinical treatment, with resistance of bacteria to antibiotics demonstrably caused by non-genetic differences. Variability in gene expression may also contribute

to resistance of sub-populations of cancer cells to chemotherapy. In certain contexts, such as the survival of microbes in rapidly changing stressful environments, or several

types of scattered differentiation, noise may be essential.

Digital Communication in the Presence of Noise

Module by: Don Johnson. E-mail the author

Summary: Several factors of error in digital receivers are discussed.

When we incorporate additive noise into our channel model, so that r(t)=αsi(t)+n(t), errors can creep in. If the transmitter sent bit 0 using a BPSK signal set, the integrators'

outputs in the matched filter receiver would be:

∫(n+1)TnTr(t)s0(t)dt=αA2T+∫(n+1)TnTn(t)s0(t)dt

(1)

∫(n+1)TnTr(t)s1(t)dt=αA2T+∫(n+1)TnTn(t)s1(t)dt

It is the quantities containing the noise terms that cause errors in the receiver's decision-making process. Because they involve noise, the values of these integrals are random quantities drawn

from some probability distribution that vary erratically from bit interval to bit interval. Because the noise has zero average value and has an equal amount of power in all frequency bands, the

values of the integrals will hover about zero. What is important is how much they vary. If the noise is such that its integral term is more negative than  αA2T, then the receiver will make an

error, deciding that the transmitted zero-valued bit was indeed a one. The probability that this situation occurs depends on three factors:

 Signal Set Choice — The difference between the signal-dependent terms in the integrators' outputs (equations Equation 1) defines how large the noise term must be for an

incorrect receiver decision to result. What affects the probability of such errors occurring is the energy in the difference of the received signals in comparison to the noise term's

variability. The signal-difference energy equals

 ∫T0(s1(t)−s0(t))2dt

For our BPSK baseband signal set, the difference-signal-energy term is 4α2A4T2.

 Variability of the Noise Term — We quantify variability by the spectral height of the white noise N02 added by the channel.

 Probability Distribution of the Noise Term — The value of the noise terms relative to the signal terms and the probability of their occurrence directly affect the likelihood

that a receiver error will occur. For the white noise we have been considering, the underlying distributions are Gaussian. Deriving the following expression for the probability the

receiver makes an error on any bit transmission is complicated but can be found at (Reference) and (Reference).

pe==Q⎛⎝⎜2∫T0(s1(t)−s0(t))2dt2N0−−−−−−−−−−−−−−−−−−√⎞⎠⎟Q⎛⎝⎜22α2A2TN0−−−−−−−−√⎞⎠⎟  f

or the BPSK case

(2)

Here Q(⋅) is the integral Q(x)=12π√∫∞xe−α22dα. This integral has no closed form expression, but it can be accurately computed. As Figure 1 illustrates, Q(⋅) is a

decreasing, very nonlinear function.

Figure 1: The function Q(x) is plotted in

semilogarithmic coordinates. Note that it decreases
very rapidly for small increases in its arguments. For
example, when x increases from 4 to 5, Q(x) decreases
by a factor of 100.

The term A2T equals the energy expended by the transmitter in sending the bit; we label this term Eb. We arrive at a concise expression for the probability the matched filter receiver

makes a bit-reception error.

pe=Q⎛⎝2α2EbN0−−−−−−√⎞⎠

(3)

Figure 2 shows how the receiver's error rate varies with the signal-to-noise ratio α2EbN0.
 Figure 2: The probability that the matched-filter
receiver makes an error on any bit transmission is
plotted against the signal-to-noise ratio of the
received signal. The upper curve shows the
performance of the FSK signal set, the lower (and
therefore better) one the BPSK signal set.

signal-to-noise ratio (S/N or SNR)

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In analog and digital communications, signal-to-noise ratio, often written S/N or SNR,
is a measure of signal strength relative to background noise. The ratio is usually
measured in decibels (dB).
If the incoming signal strength in microvolts is Vs, and the noise level, also in
microvolts, is Vn, then the signal-to-noise ratio, S/N, in decibels is given by the
formula
S/N = 20 log10(Vs/Vn)
If Vs = Vn, then S/N = 0. In this situation, the signal borders on unreadable, because
the noise level severely competes with it. In digital communications, this will
probably cause a reduction in data speed because of frequent errors that require the
source (transmitting) computer or terminal to resend some packets of data.
Ideally, Vs is greater than Vn, so S/N is positive. As an example, suppose that Vs =
10.0 microvolts and Vn = 1.00 microvolt. Then
 S/N = 20 log10(10.0) = 20.0 dB
which results in the signal being clearly readable. If the signal is much weaker but still
above the noise -- say 1.30 microvolts -- then
S/N
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= 20 log10(1.30) = 2.28 dB
which is a marginal situation. There might be some reduction in data speed under
these conditions.
If Vs is less than Vn, then S/N is negative. In this type of situation, reliable
communication is generally not possible unless steps are taken to increase the signal
level and/or decrease the noise level at the destination (receiving) computer or
terminal.
Communications engineers always strive to maximize the S/N ratio. Traditionally, this
has been done by using the narrowest possible receiving-system bandwidth consistent
with the data speed desired. However, there are other methods. In some cases, spread
spectrumtechniques can improve system performance. The S/N ratio can be increased
by providing the source with a higher level of signal output power if necessary. In
some high-level systems such as radio telescopes, internal noise is minimized by
lowering the temperature of the receiving circuitry to near absolute zero (-273 degrees
Celsius or -459 degrees Fahrenheit). In wireless systems, it is always important to
optimize the performance of the transmitting and receiving antennas.