DATA COMMUNICATION

CSE 225/233

WEEK-3, LESSON-2

DATA AND SIGNAL

Transmission Impairment
Signals travel through transmission media, which are not
perfect. The imperfection causes signal impairment. This
means that the signal at the beginning of the medium is not
the same as the signal at the end of the medium. What is sent
is not what is received. Three causes of impairment are
attenuation, distortion, and noise.

Data Communication Lecture Series, NRC, MAY2020 3.2

Causes of impairment

3.3
Attenuation
Attenuation means a loss of energy. When a signal, simple or
composite, travels through a medium, it loses some of its
energy in overcoming the resistance of the medium. That is
why a wire carrying electric signals gets warm, if not hot, after
a while. Some of the electrical energy in the signal is converted
to heat. To compensate for this loss, amplifiers are used to
amplify the signal. Following figure shows the effect of
attenuation and amplification.

Data Communication Lecture Series, NRC, MAY2020 3.4

Decibel
• To show that a signal has lost or gained strength, we use the
concept of the decibel (dB).
• The decibel measures the relative strengths of two signals or
a signal at two different points.
• The decibel is negative if a signal is attenuated and positive if
a signal is amplified.

• where P1 and P2 are the powers of a signal at points 1

and 2, respectively

Data Communication Lecture Series, NRC, MAY2020 3.5

Example (1)
Suppose a signal travels through a transmission medium and its
power is reduced to one-half. This means that P2 is (1/2)P1. In
this case, the attenuation (loss of power) can be calculated as

A loss of 3 dB (–3 dB) is equivalent to losing one-half the power.

Data Communication Lecture Series, NRC, MAY2020 3.6

Example (2)
A signal travels through an amplifier, and its power is increased
10 times. This means that P2 = 10P1 . In this case, the
amplification (gain of power) can be calculated as

Data Communication Lecture Series, NRC, MAY2020 3.7

Example (3)
One reason that engineers use the decibel to measure the
changes in the strength of a signal is that decibel numbers can
be added (or subtracted) when we are measuring several
points (cascading) instead of just two. In Figure 3.27 a signal
travels from point 1 to point 4. In this case, the decibel value
can be calculated as

Data Communication Lecture Series, NRC, MAY2020 3.8

Example (4)
Sometimes the decibel is used to measure signal power in
milliwatts. In this case, it is referred to as dBm and is calculated
as dBm = 10 log10 Pm , where Pm is the power in milliwatts.
Calculate the power of a signal with dBm = −30.

We can calculate the power in the signal as

Data Communication Lecture Series, NRC, MAY2020 3.9

Example (5)
The loss in a cable is usually defined in decibels per kilometer
(dB/km). If the signal at the beginning of a cable with −0.3
dB/km has a power of 2 mW, what is the power of the signal at
5 km?

Solution
The loss in the cable in decibels is 5 × (−0.3) = −1.5 dB. We can
calculate the power as

Data Communication Lecture Series, NRC, MAY2020 3.10

Distortion
• Distortion means that the signal changes its form or shape.
• Distortion occurs in a composite signal made of different
frequencies.
• Each signal component has its own propagation speed
through a medium and therefore its own delay in arriving at
the final destination.

Data Communication Lecture Series, NRC, MAY2020 3.11

 Noise
• Noise is another cause of impairment. Several types of noise,
such as thermal noise, induced noise, crosstalk, and impulse
noise, may corrupt the signal.
• Thermal noise is the random motion of electrons in a wire,
which creates an extra signal not originally sent by the
transmitter.
• Induced noise comes from sources such as motors and
appliancses. These devices act as a sending antenna, and the
transmission medium acts as the receiving antenna.
• Crosstalk is the effect of one wire on the other. One wire acts
as a sending antenna and the other as the receiving antenna.
• Impulse noise is a spike (a signal with high energy in a very
short time) that comes from power lines, lightning, and so on.

Data Communication Lecture Series, NRC, MAY2020 3.12

Noise

3.13
 Signal to Noise Ratio
• SNR is the statistical ratio of power of the signal to the
power of the noise
• In decibels it can be expressed as follows:

Data Communication Lecture Series, NRC, MAY2020 3.14

Example (1)
The power of a signal is 10 mW and the power of the noise is 1
μW; what are the values of SNR and SNRdB ?

Solution
The values of SNR and SNRdB can be calculated as follows:

Data Communication Lecture Series, NRC, MAY2020 3.15

Example (2)
The values of SNR and SNRdB for a noiseless channel are

Solution:

We can never achieve this ratio in real life; it is an ideal.

Data Communication Lecture Series, NRC, MAY2020 3.16

Data Rate Limits
A very important consideration in data communications is how
fast we can send data, in bits per second, over a channel. Data
rate depends on three factors:

1. The bandwidth available

2. The level of the signals we use
3. The quality of the channel (the level of noise)

Two theoretical formulas were developed to calculate the data

rate:
Nyquist for a noiseless channel
Shannon for a noisy channel

Data Communication Lecture Series, NRC, MAY2020 3.17

Noiseless channel: Nyquist bit rate
For a noiseless channel, the Nyquist bit rate formula defines
the theoretical maximum bit rate

Where,
C is the channel capacity or bit rate in bps
B is the bandwidth in Hz
L is the number of signal levels used to represent
data

Data Communication Lecture Series, NRC, MAY2020 3.18

Example (1)
Consider a noiseless channel with a bandwidth of 3000 Hz
transmitting a signal with two signal levels (binary signal).
The maximum bit rate can be calculated as

Consider the same noiseless channel transmitting a signal

with four signal levels (for each level, we send 2 bits). The
maximum bit rate can be calculated as

Data Communication Lecture Series, NRC, MAY2020 3.19

Example (2)
We need to send 265 kbps over a noiseless channel with a
bandwidth of 20 kHz. How many signal levels do we need?

Solution
We can use the Nyquist formula as shown:

Since this result is not a power of 2, we need to either

increase the number of levels or reduce the bit rate. If we
have 128 levels, the bit rate is 280 kbps. If we have 64
levels, the bit rate is 240 kbps.

Data Communication Lecture Series, NRC, MAY2020 3.20

Noisy channel: Shannon capacity
• In reality, we cannot have a noiseless channel; the channel is
always noisy.
• In this case, the Shannon capacity formula is used to
determine the theoretical highest data rate for a noisy
channel:

Where,
C is the capacity of the channel in bps
B is the bandwidth in Hz
SNR is the signal to noise ratio

Data Communication Lecture Series, NRC, MAY2020 3.21

Example (1)
Consider an extremely noisy channel in which the value of the
signal-to-noise ratio is almost zero. In other words, the noise is
so strong that the signal is faint. For this channel the capacity C
is calculated as

This means that the capacity of this channel is zero

regardless of the bandwidth. In other words, we cannot
receive any data through this channel.

Data Communication Lecture Series, NRC, MAY2020 3.22

Example (2)
We can calculate the theoretical highest bit rate of a regular
telephone line. A telephone line normally has a bandwidth of
3000. The signal-to-noise ratio is usually 3162. For this channel
the capacity is calculated as

This means that the highest bit rate for a telephone line is
34.860 kbps. If we want to send data faster than this, we
can either increase the bandwidth of the line or improve
the signal-to-noise ratio.

Data Communication Lecture Series, NRC, MAY2020 3.23

Example (3)
The signal-to-noise ratio is often given in decibels. Assume that
SNRdB = 36 and the channel bandwidth is 2 MHz. The
theoretical channel capacity can be calculated as

Data Communication Lecture Series, NRC, MAY2020 3.24

Example (4)
We have a channel with a 1-MHz bandwidth. The SNR for this
channel is 63. What are the appropriate bit rate and signal
level?

Solution
First, we use the Shannon formula to find the upper limit.

The Shannon formula gives us 6 Mbps, the upper limit. For

better performance we choose something lower, 4 Mbps,
for example. Then we use the Nyquist formula to find the
number of signal levels.

Data Communication Lecture Series, NRC, MAY2020 3.25

Performance
One important issue in networking is the performance of the
network—how good is it? In this section, we introduce the
following terms to measure the performance.

Bandwidth
Throughput
Latency (Delay)

Data Communication Lecture Series, NRC, MAY2020 3.26

Bandwidth
In networking, we use the term bandwidth in two contexts.

The first, bandwidth in hertz, refers to the range of frequencies

in a composite signal or the range of frequencies that a channel
can pass.

The second, bandwidth in bits per second, refers to the speed

of bit transmission in a channel or link.

Data Communication Lecture Series, NRC, MAY2020 3.27

Example
The bandwidth of a subscriber line is 4 kHz for voice or data.
The bandwidth of this line for data transmission can be up to
56,000 bps using a sophisticated modem to change the digital
signal to analog.

If the telephone company improves the quality of the line and

increases the bandwidth to 8 kHz, we can send 112,000 bps by
using the same technology.

Data Communication Lecture Series, NRC, MAY2020 3.28

Throughput
The throughput is the measurement of how fast data can
pass through a network in one second.

Throughput is calculated as follows:

Data Communication Lecture Series, NRC, MAY2020 3.29

Example
A network with bandwidth of 10 Mbps can pass only an
average of 12,000 frames per minute with each frame carrying
an average of 10,000 bits. What is the throughput of this
network?
Solution
We can calculate the throughput as

The throughput is almost one-fifth of the bandwidth in this

case.

Data Communication Lecture Series, NRC, MAY2020 3.30

Latency (Delay)
The latency or delay defines how long it takes for an entire
message to completely arrive at the destination from the time
the first bit is sent out from the source. We can say that latency
is made of four components: propagation time, transmission
time, queuing time and processing delay.

Data Communication Lecture Series, NRC, MAY2020 3.31

Propagation time and transmission time
Propagation time measures the time required for a signal (or a
bit) to travel from one point of the transmission medium to
another.
Propagation time is calculated as follows:

Transmission time measures the time required for a signal

to be transmitted from the sending device to the medium.
Transmission time is calculated as follows:

Data Communication Lecture Series, NRC, MAY2020 3.32

Example (1)
What is the propagation time if the distance between the
two points is 12,000 km? Assume the propagation speed to
be 2.4×108 m/s in cable.
Solution
We can calculate the propagation time as

The example shows that a bit can go over the Atlantic Ocean in
only 50 ms if there is a direct cable between the source and the
destination.

Data Communication Lecture Series, NRC, MAY2020 3.33

Example (2)
What are the propagation time and the transmission time for a
2.5kbyte message (an e-mail) if the bandwidth of the network is 1
Gbps? Assume that the distance between the sender and the
receiver is 12,000 km and that light travels at 2.4×108 m/s
Solution
We can calculate the propagation and transmission time as follows:

Note that in this case, because the message is short and the bandwidth is
high, the dominant factor is the propagation time, not the transmission
time. The transmission time can be ignored.

Data Communication Lecture Series, NRC, MAY2020 3.34

Example (3)
What are the propagation time and the transmission time for a 5-
Mbyte message (an image) if the bandwidth of the network is 1
Mbps? Assume that the distance between the sender and the
receiver is 12,000 km and that light travels at 2.4 × 108 m/s.
Solution
We can calculate the propagation and transmission time as follows:

Note that in this case, because the message is very long and the bandwidth
is not very high, the dominant factor is the transmission time, not the
propagation time. The propagation time can be ignored.

Data Communication Lecture Series, NRC, MAY2020 3.35

Example (3)
What are the propagation time and the transmission time for a 5-
Mbyte message (an image) if the bandwidth of the network is 1
Mbps? Assume that the distance between the sender and the
receiver is 12,000 km and that light travels at 2.4 × 108 m/s.
Solution
We can calculate the propagation and transmission time as follows:

Note that in this case, because the message is very long and the bandwidth
is not very high, the dominant factor is the transmission time, not the
propagation time. The propagation time can be ignored.

Data Communication Lecture Series, NRC, MAY2020 3.36

3.37