Defining, designing, and evaluating digital communication systems

The fundamental relationships in defining, designing, and evaluating digital communication system performance are reviewed. The concept of bandwidth-limited and power-limited systems and how such conditions influence the design when the choices are confined to M-ary phase-shift keying (MPSK) and M-ary frequency-shift keying (MFSK) modulation are examined. The definitions and computations involved in transforming from data bits to channel bits to symbols to chips are discussed. It is suggested that since most digital communication systems share these concepts, understanding them should enable one to evaluate other such systems in a similar way.<>