ECE461
ECE461 (Digital Communications) is a 3-credit-hour course that satisfies the Technical Electives requirement for ECE majors and satisfies the 1-of-6 Electrical Engineering Foundations Course for CEs. It is offered only in spring semesters.
Content Covered
ECE461 deals primarily with theory---that is, modeling of a communication system, which consists of the transmitter, channel, and receiver. Throughout the course you will consider how communication systems achieve constraints on energy efficiency, rate, and accuracy. You will use what you learned in ECE313 to examine the efficiency and accuracy of various methods of communication of bits across a channel. A recurring theme in the course is how to construct a sufficient statistic at the receiver by processing the received bits in order to ultimately reconstruct the original sequence. In the first part of the course, you will learn about additive white Gaussian noise and how communication channels work. Then the course goes on to cover communication across a wire line channel and about the implications of using schemes such as repetition coding, pulse position modulation, and sequential communication. In later parts of the course, students deal with wireless channels, in which effects from electromagnetic fields such as Doppler shift and mobility affect the modeling of the channel. In this portion of the course you will gain insight on modern techniques in communications that companies such as Qualcomm use.
Prerequisites
ECE210 and ECE313 are listed as the prerequisites. It is especially important to have a good background and/or interest in probability. Probability theory forms a sizeable bulk of this course---you will need to be able to work with continuous and (to a lesser extent) discrete random variables throughout this course. It will be helpful if you have taken ECE310 because one of the main topics, inter-symbol interference, involves more or less a linear time-invariant channel in discrete time. If you have any exposure to linear algebra, you will have an advantage because the field of digital communications involves a lot of linear algebra.
When to Take It
ECE461 is usually offered only in the spring semester. If you are interested in communications, you should take this course after completing ECE313. Although difficult, this class is relatively light workload and is a good class to take in combination with heavier workload classes such as ECE385.
Course Structure
The workload in this course is comparable to that of ECE329, or a little bit less than ECE210 for those who haven't taken ECE329. Each week students are assigned a problem set consisting of up to about 4 problems. Typically these problems will ask you to apply something learned in lecture to derive or prove an interesting relationship. Certain homeworks have also assigned MATLAB problems, where students program certain algorithms learned in class. The workload of this class is relatively small at about 3-10 hours per week depending on whether or not there is a MATLAB component in the homework.
Instructors
The course is taught by Professor Juan Alvarez.
Life After
The communications area electives are only usually offered once a year, with ECE459 (Communications Systems) in the fall only and ECE463 (Digital Communications Lab) in the spring only. Since this is a course that deals primarily with theory, there are numerous options for you if you are interested in applied aspects of communications. ECE461 is a pre/co-requisite to ECE463, which is a LabVIEW-based lab course in digital communications. In ECE453 (Wireless Communications Systems), you work with radio frequency (RF) circuitry to build hardware components in communications systems. ECE459 (Communications Systems) is a theory course that deals primarily with analog communications and modulation techniques, but with a few topical overlaps with ECE461. In ECE438 (Communication Networks) and ECE439 (Wireless Networks), you explore network architectures between computers (ECE438 and 439 are cross-listed with the CS department). Students who wish to pursue digital communications at the graduate level should also consider MATH 415/416 (courses in linear algebra), MATH 444/447 (courses in real analysis), MATH 446/448 (courses in complex analysis), and/or ECE493 (Advanced Engineering Math).