Beruflich Dokumente
Kultur Dokumente
A channel is a communications medium, through which data can flow through. In a wireless network, the channel is the open space between the sender and the receiver through with the electromagnetic waves travel. In a wired network, the channel is the wire through with the electrical signals flow.
Likewise, if we have a signal with an amplitude of A, and a noise with variance , we calculate the SNR as:
The higher the SNR, the more faithful the received signal will be to the sent signal. The lower the SNR, the more likely the received signal is going to contain errors. We won't cover SNR in too much detail in this book. However, the SNR is a very important quantity in a communications system, and there are classes of codes that are designed to help reduce errors in a channel with a low SNR.
Bandwidth[edit]
Bandwidth is a measurement of a communication's channel, and determines what frequency ranges are transmitted faithfully through the channel, and which ranges are not. We don't need to discuss bandwidth in any detail in this book, but suffice it to say that it is an important quality of a communications channel.
The channel capacity is the bit rate at which data can be sent along a channel with a negligible error rate. Attempting to send bits faster then this rate will increase the error
rate beyond a negligible value. This will have large negative effects on our communications system. Notice that for a fixed bandwidth, as SNR decreases, the bitrate must also decrease.