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Digital Communication System Design

Credits: 4

Tags: communication systems

Class Overview

The goal of this course is to understand how state-of-the-art digital communication systems are designed and why they are designed in the way they are. The course will cover communication theory, transceiver algorithms that enable reliable communication, wireless channels, and modern communication standards (such as 3GPP LTE and WiFi). The students will design a working audio-band communication system that relies on orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM).

Prerequisites: ECE 2720, Recommended prerequistes/corequistes: ECE 3100 and ECE 3250
Key Topics: communication theory, transceiver algorithms

Professor: Professor Aaron Wagner

Semester(s): Spring

Difficulty: 3.5/5

Rating: 5/5

Assignments: 5 labs, 8 homework sets, will alternate between labs and homework sets (never due in the same week)

Exams: one prelim and one cumulative final exam

Pros

  • A lot of theory, but you get to work on hands-on projects that allow you to design digital communication systems over physical channels using a server-based system called CommCloud that was designed specifically for the course
  • Lectures are great and cover a lot of interesting material in the class

Cons

  • Extremely challenging if you try to take it without the prereqs and coreqs, since the material from ECE 3250 and ECE 3100 is the foundation for all of the analysis in this class.

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