# Digital Communication Laboratory

Last updated: 05/19/2016

## Author Information

Professor Lee C. Potter
Dr. Yang Yang
Electrical and Computer Engineering
The Ohio State University

## Course Details

### Description

This laboratory course provides hands-on exploration of physical layer communication. Through a sequence of guided explorations, students design and implement a digital communication system with modulation to an acoustic carrier frequency. The acoustic operation allows students to hear, see, and wirelessly transmit signals using readily available, low-cost hardware, such as a PC with sound card or a smartphone. Acoustic wireless transmission, while readily accessible, nonetheless presents a student with the channel impairments and synchronization issues encountered in radio frequency systems. An accompanying smartphone app provides an acoustic transmitter for receiver testing and is available for free download. Matlab files provide code for creating examples and figures found in the text.

Figure 1. Acoustic Transmitter App

### Prerequisites

- Introduction to Analog and Digital Communications

### Original Course Documents

Source file URL

## Course Contents

### Lesson 1

- Introduction

#### Reading

- Chapter 1

### Lesson 2

- Quadrature Modulation

#### Reading

- Chapter 2

### Lesson 3

- Digital Modulation

#### Reading

- Chapter 3

### Lesson 4

- Pulse Shaping and Intersymbol Interference

#### Reading

- Chapter 4

### Lesson 5

- Synchronization

#### Reading

- Chapter 5

### Lesson 6

- Frequency Recovery

#### Reading

- Chapter 6

### Lesson 7

- Acoustic Modem Demonstration

#### Reading

- Chapter 7

## Project

### Project Details

The explorations in Chapters 1 through 7 culminate in students implementing a half-duplex modem operating at an acoustic carrier frequency.

## Textbooks

### A Digital Communication Laboratory: Implementing a Software-Defined Acoustic Modem

By Lee Potter and Yang Yang
Free pdf version
At cost paperback version

## Resources

Acoustic Transmitter App

- iTunes
- GooglePlay

## Links

MATLAB Code Files
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 Unported License.