Admas University

School of Postgraduate Studies

Sep 2021
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 Chapter One
Data Communication Basics
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Communication Basics
• When we communicate, we are sharing information – (local or
remote)
• Between individuals, local communication usually occurs face to
face, while remote communication takes place over distance.
• The term telecommunication means communication at a distance
(tele is Greek for "far")
-includes telephony, telegraphy, and television,…
• The word data refers to information presented in whatever form is
agreed upon by the parties creating and using the data.
• Data communications are the exchange of data between two devices
via some form of transmission medium such as a wire cable.
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Fundamental Characteristics
The effectiveness of a data communications system depends on
four fundamental characteristics:
Delivery: System must deliver data to correct destination.
Accuracy: System must deliver data accurately.
Timelines: System must deliver data in timely manner.
Jitter: it is a variation in packet transit delay caused by queuing,
contention and serialization effects on the path through the
network.

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Components of Data communication
There are five basic components of data communication.
1. Message
2. Sender
3. Receiver
4. Medium
5. Protocol

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Cont’d...
1. Message: it is the information (data) to be communicated. Popular forms of
information include text, pictures, audio, video etc.
2. Sender: it is the device which sends the data messages. It can be a computer,
workstation, telephone handset, video camera, etc.
3. Receiver: it is the device which receives the data messages. It can be a
computer, workstation, telephone handset, television etc
4. Transmission Medium: it is the physical path by which a message travels
from sender to receiver. Some examples include twisted-pair wire, coaxial
cable, fiber-optic cable, radio waves etc.
5. Protocol: it is a set of rules that governs the data communication. It represents
an agreement between the communication device.
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Data Representation Techniques
Information today comes in different forms such as text, numbers, images, audio, and
video.
Text
• In data communications, text is represented as a bit pattern, a sequence of bits (0s or 1s).
• Different sets of bit patterns have been designed to represent text symbols. Each set
is called a code, and the process of representing symbols is called coding.
• Today, the prevalent coding system is called Unicode, which uses 32 bits to
represent a symbol or character used in any language in the world. The American
Standard Code for Information Interchange (ASCII), developed some decades ago
in the United States, now constitutes the first 127 characters in Unicode and is also
referred to as Basic Latin.

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Cont’d…
Numbers
• Numbers are also represented by bit patterns. However, a code such as
ASCII is not used to represent numbers; the number is directly
converted to a binary number to simplify mathematical operations.
Images
• Images are also represented by bit patterns. In its simplest form, an
image is composed of a matrix of pixels (picture elements), where each
pixel is a small dot. The size of the pixel depends on the resolution.
• For example, an image can be divided into 1000 pixels or 10,000 pixels.
In the second case, there is a better representation of the image (better
resolution), but more memory is needed to store the image.

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Cont’d…
Audio
• Audio refers to the recording or broadcasting of sound or music. Audio
is by nature different from text, numbers, or images. It is continuous, not
discrete. Even when we use a microphone to change voice or music to
an electric signal, we create a continuous signal.
Video
• Video refers to the recording or broadcasting of a picture or movie.
Video can either be produced as a continuous entity (e.g., by a TV
camera), or it can be a combination of images, each a discrete entity,
arranged to convey the idea of motion.

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Data Transmission
Signal is electric or electromagnetic representations of data, physically propagates along
medium
Transmission is the communication of data by the propagation and processing of signals.
Data transmission occurs between transmitter and receiver over some transmission
medium.
The successful transmission of data depends principally on two factors: the quality of the
signal being transmitted and the characteristics of the transmission medium.
Transmission media may be classified as guided or unguided. In both cases, communication
is in the form of electromagnetic waves.
Guided media: the waves are guided along a physical path;
 Eg. twisted pair, coaxial cable, and optical fiber.
Unguided media (Wireless): provide a means for transmitting electromagnetic waves but
do not guide them;
 Eg. propagation through air, vacuum, and seawater. 10
Analog and Digital Data
The terms analog and digital correspond, roughly, to continuous
and discrete, respectively.
Analog data take on continuous values in some interval. For
example, voice and video are continuously varying patterns of
intensity. Most data collected by sensors, such as temperature and
pressure, are continuous valued.
Digital data take on discrete values; examples are text and
integers.
The most familiar examples of analog data are audio and video.
A familiar example of digital data is text or character strings.
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Analog and Digital Signals
In a communications system, data are propagated from one
point to another by means of electromagnetic signals.
An analog signal is a continuously varying electromagnetic
wave that may be propagated over a variety of media,
depending on spectrum.
A digital signal is a sequence of voltage pulses that may be
transmitted over a wire medium; for example, a constant
positive voltage level may represent binary 0 and a constant
negative voltage level may represent binary 1.
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Cont’d…
The principal advantages of digital signaling are that it is generally
cheaper than analog signaling and is less susceptible to noise
interference.
The principal disadvantage is that digital signals suffer more from
attenuation than do analog signals.

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Analog and Digital Signaling of Analog and Digital Data

Digital data can be represented by analog signals, with a different

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Cont’d…
Analog data can be represented by digital signals. The device that
performs this function for voice data is a codec (coder-decoder).

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Analog and Digital Transmission
Analog transmission is a means of transmitting analog signals without regard to their
content; the signals may represent analog data (e.g., voice) or digital data (e.g., binary
data that pass through a modem).
In either case, the analog signal will become weaker (attenuate) after a certain
distance.
To achieve longer distances, the analog transmission system includes amplifiers that
boost the energy in the signal.
Unfortunately, the amplifier also boosts the noise components. With amplifiers
cascaded to achieve long distances, the signal becomes more and more distorted.
For analog data, such as voice, quite a bit of distortion can be tolerated and the data
remain intelligible.
However, for digital data, cascaded amplifiers will introduce errors.

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Cont’d…
Digital transmission, in contrast, assumes a binary content to the signal.
A digital signal can be transmitted only a limited distance before attenuation,
noise, and other impairments endanger the integrity of the data.
To achieve greater distances, repeaters are used. A repeater receives the digital
signal, recovers the pattern of 1s and 0s, and retransmits a new signal. Thus the
attenuation is overcome.
The same technique may be used with an analog signal if it is assumed that the
signal carries digital data. At appropriately spaced points, the transmission
system has repeaters rather than amplifiers. The repeater recovers the digital
data from the analog signal and generates a new, clean analog signal. Thus
noise is not cumulative.

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Cont’d…
The question naturally arises as to which is the preferred method of transmission.
 Both long-haul telecommunications facilities and intra-building services have
moved to digital transmission and, where possible, digital signaling techniques.
The most important reasons are as follows:
 Digital technology: The advent of large-scale integration (LSI) and very-large scale integration (VLSI)
technology has caused a continuing drop in the cost and size of digital circuitry. Analog equipment has
not shown a similar drop.
 Data integrity: With the use of repeaters rather than amplifiers, the effects of noise and other signal
impairments are not cumulative. Thus it is possible to transmit data longer distances and over lower
quality lines by digital means while maintaining the integrity of the data.
 Capacity utilization: It has become economical to build transmission links of very high bandwidth,
including satellite channels and optical fiber. A high degree of multiplexing is needed to utilize such
capacity effectively, and this is more easily and cheaply achieved with digital (time division) rather than
analog (frequency division) techniques.
 Security and privacy: Encryption techniques can be readily applied to digital data and to analog data
that have been digitized.
 Integration: By treating both analog and digital data digitally, all signals have the same form and can be
treated similarly. Thus economies of scale and convenience can be achieved by integrating voice, video,
and digital data. 19
Transmission Impairments
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.
most significant impairments are
• attenuation
• distortion
• noise

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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.
Some of the electrical energy in the signal is converted to
heat. To compensate for this loss, amplifiers are used to
amplify the signal.

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Distortion
Distortion means that the signal changes its form or shape.
only occurs in guided media
Distortion can occur in a composite signal made of different frequencies.
hence various frequency components arrive at different times
Each signal component has its own propagation speed through a medium and,
therefore, its own delay in arriving at the final destination.
Differences in delay may create a difference in phase if the delay is not exactly
the same as the period duration.
Signal components at the receiver have phases different from what they had at
the sender.

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Noise
Additional signals inserted between transmitter and receiver
Several types of noise, such as thermal noise, induced noise,
crosstalk, and impulse noise, may corrupt the signal.
Thermal noise: 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
appliances.
Crosstalk: is the effect of one wire on the other.
Impulse noise: is a spike that comes from power lines, lightning,
and so on.
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Mode of Data Transmission
Communication between two devices can be simplex,
half-duplex, or full-duplex.
Simplex Mode
• In simplex mode, the communication is unidirectional, as on a
one-way street.
• Only one of the two devices on a link can transmit; the other can
only receive
• The simplex mode can use the entire capacity of the channel to
send data in one direction.

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Cont’d…
Half-Duplex
• In half-duplex mode, each station can both transmit
and receive, but not at the same time.
• When one device is sending, the other can only
receive, and vice versa .
• The half-duplex mode is like a one-lane road with
traffic allowed in both directions.

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Cont’d…
• When cars are traveling in one direction, cars going the other
way must wait. In a half-duplex transmission, the entire capacity
of a channel is taken over by whichever of the two devices is
transmitting at the time. Walkie-talkies and CB (citizens band)
radios are both half-duplex systems.
• The half-duplex mode is used in cases where there is no need for
communication in both directions at the same time; the entire
capacity of the channel can be utilized for each direction.

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Cont’d…
Full-Duplex
• In full-duplex mode (also called duplex), both stations can transmit
and receive simultaneously.
• The full-duplex mode is like a two-way street with traffic flowing
in both directions at the same time.
• In full-duplex mode, signals going in one direction share the
capacity of the link with signals going in the other direction. This
sharing can occur in two ways: Either the link must contain two
physically separate transmission paths, one for sending and the
other for receiving; or the capacity of the channel is divided
between signals traveling in both directions.

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Cont’d…
• One common example of full-duplex communication is the
telephone network.
• When two people are communicating by a telephone line, both
can talk and listen at the same time.
• The full-duplex mode is used when communication in both
directions is required all the time. The capacity of the channel,
however, must be divided between the two directions.

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Multiplexing
Multiplexing deals with the division of the resources to
create multiple channels.
Multiplexing describes how several users can share a
medium with minimum or no interference.
Multiplexing allows several transmission sources to share a
larger transmission capacity.
The two common forms of multiplexing are frequency
division multiplexing (FDM) and time division multiplexing
(TDM).
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Frequency Division multiplexing
It can be used with analog signals.
A number of signals are carried simultaneously on the same medium
by allocating to each signal a different frequency band.
Modulation equipment is needed to move each signal to the required
frequency band, and multiplexing equipment is needed to combine the
modulated signals.

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Time Division Multiplexing
Basically two types of TDM.
1. Synchronous time division multiplexing
2. Statistical time division multiplexing

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Synchronous time division
multiplexing
can be used with digital signals or analog signals carrying
digital data.
In this form of multiplexing, data from various sources
are carried in repetitive frames.
Each frame consists of a set of time slots, and each source
is assigned one or more time slots per frame.
The effect is to interleave bits of data from the various
sources.

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Statistical time division multiplexing
Provides a generally more efficient service than synchronous
TDM for the support of terminals.
With statistical TDM, time slots are not pre-assigned to
particular data sources.
User data are buffered and transmitted as rapidly as possible
using available time slots.

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Data Transmission Error Detection
and Correction
Networks must be able to transfer data from one device to another
with acceptable accuracy. For most applications, a system must
guarantee that the data received are identical to the data transmitted.
Any time data are transmitted from one node to the next, they can
become corrupted in passage. Many factors can alter one or more bits
of a message. Some applications require a mechanism for detecting
and correcting errors.
Some applications can tolerate a small level of error. For example,
random errors in audio or video transmissions may be tolerable, but
when we transfer text, we expect a very high level of accuracy.

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 Types of Errors
Whenever bits flow from one point to another, they are subject to unpredictable changes because
of interference. This interference can change the shape of the signal.
The term single-bit error means that only 1 bit of a given data unit (such as a byte, character, or
packet) is changed from 1 to 0 or from 0 to 1. The term burst error means that 2 or more bits in the
data unit have changed from 1 to 0 or from 0 to 1.
A burst error is more likely to occur than a single-bit error because the duration of the noise signal
is normally longer than the duration of 1 bit, which means that when noise affects data, it affects a
set of bits.
The number of bits affected depends on the data rate and duration of noise.
For example, if we are sending data at 1 kbps, a noise of 1/100 second can affect 10 bits; if we are
sending data at 1 Mbps, the same noise can affect 10,000 bits.

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Detection versus Correction
The correction of errors is more difficult than the detection.
In error detection, we are only looking to see if any error has occurred. The
answer is a simple yes or no. We are not even interested in the number of
corrupted bits. A single-bit error is the same for us as a burst error.
In error correction, we need to know the exact number of bits that are corrupted
and, more importantly, their location in the message. The number of errors and the
size of the message are important factors.

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