Harold Stern and Samy Mahmoud
COMMUNICATION SYSTEMS: Analysis and Design
Softcover, pp. 530, plus XVIII, $ 53.99
Pearson Education Inc., Upper Saddle River, NJ 07458, 2004
ISBN 0-3-21929-4
http://www.pearsoneduc.com

In general about the book

Telephone, radio, and television are integral parts of our modern life, today. Satellites span the globe carrying text, data, voice, and images. Computers talk to computers over the Internet and other interconnection networks. Wireless personal communication devices keep us connected wherever we go. All these facilities are possible thanks to the communication system, which in general conveys information from its source to a destination, some distance away. Impressive progress has been made in the field of communications during the last forty years, but surely the next two decades will be usher in many new achievements in this area. Today's needs in computer internetworking, mobile-, wireless-, and satellite-communications include requirements for increased bandwidth, guaranteed quality of service, support for multimedia, and the radio, and television signals broadcasting. This means that communicating professionals have to keep up with technological changes that are constantly occurring.

This textbook introduces communication systems, including analysis methods, design principles, and hardware consideration at global block level. Authors have written, in a logical order, about most of the basics of the emerging field of communication systems. The book consists of ten chapters, References, Answers to Selected Problems, and an Index. It comes with CD ROM that includes PowerPoint-based animated presentation of certain examples, and pdf files with full/color versions of selected figures from the books.

Chapter content

The book includes ten chapters and an Index. It is organized as follows.

Chapter 1 (Introduction, pp. 1-5) briefly involves the reader with components of a communication system, and points to trade-offs of performance versus costs.

Chapter 2 (Frequency domain analysis, pp. 6-74) is devoted to the fundamentals of frequency domain analysis, including the Fourier series, representing power in the frequency domain, and Fourier transform. Chapter 3 (Digital baseband modulation techniques, pp. 75-122) deals with the first important step in any digital communication system, transforming the source information to a form that is compatible with a digital system. The main topics discussed here relate to the baseband modulation using rectangular pulses and binary pulse, pulse shaping in order to improve spectral frequency, and building simple baseband transmitter.

In spite of that modulation and demodulation are deterministic, the information to be transmitted as well as the noise encountered in the physical transmission medium is random and stochastic. In this book the stochastic processes are thought in two parts. First in Chapter 4 (Receiver Design, pp. 123-210) in order to deal with effects of noise, random variables are involved. According to the chapter's subject the following themes are considered in more details: Developing simple PAM receiver, building optimal receiver, synchronization, equalization and multi-level PAM. Second, in Chapter 5 (Digital bandpass modulation and demodulation techniques, pp. 211-305) in order to deal with uncertainty associated with the transmitted message, random processes are introduced. More details concerning binary-ASK, -FSK , -PSK, coherent demodulation of bandpass signals, noncoherents receiver for ASK and FSK, DPSK, and M-ary bandpass techniques are given.

Chapter 6 (Analog modulation and demodulation, pp. 306-361) concentrates on analog modulation and demodulation techniques. It includes transmitting of AMSs, coherent and noncoherent demodulations of AMSs, generation and demodulation of FM and PM signals, and comparison of analog modulation techniques.

Chapter 7 (Multiplexing techniques, pp. 362-387) discusses the process of sharing many channels on a single high-speed link, called multiplexing. TDM, FDM, CDM and spread spectrum techniques are explained briefly.

Chapter 8 (Analog-to-digital and Digital-to-analog conversion, pp. 388-420) provides the basics of analog-to-digital conversion. Sampling as an important signal processing technique used for extraction short samples from the analog signal, and quantizing as a task of mapping samples of a continuous amplitude waveform to a finite state of amplitude are explained first. In the rest of the text, properties of DPCM and DM are discussed.

Chapter 9 (Fundamentals of information theory, data compression, and image compression, pp. 421-457) begins with mathematical theory of information, continues with variable-length, self-punctuating coding for data compression, after that in the next of the text identifies sources with dependent messages, and at the end discuses different image compression techniques.

Finally in Chapter 10 (Basics of errors control coding, pp. 458-508) fundamentals of error control coding are presented. The main topics discussed here are related to field theory, Hamming codes, cyclic codes, correcting burst errors, and convolutional codes and Veterbi decoding.

Useful for graduate students

This book clearly gives a broad view of the currently hottest topics in the field of contemporary communication systems. Its scope is mainly oriented toward theoretical aspect of digital communications applied to communication systems.

The style throughout is readable, but in order to follow the presented material in a successful manner, solid mathematical background is needed. Small, illustrative examples with solutions are presented throughout the book. A number of unsolved problems are given at the end of each chapter, and answers to the selected problems are attached at the end of the book.

This book represents an attempt to develop suitable text for a course mainly offered to seniors or first year graduate students, as well as professionals and researchers, interested in the field of communication systems.

All in all, the book is valuable contribution to the literature of this rapidly developing technology. I strongly recommend this book for all readers interested in digital communications.