CHAPTER 2

Data Transmission and Switching

Outline
• Data Transmission
• Transmission impairments
• Encoding, modulation, multiplexing, and transmission media.
• Switching
• Circuit , Packet & Cell switching technologies
Data Transmission
• Transmission media may be classified as guided or unguided.
• In both cases, communication is in the form of electromagnetic waves.
• With guided media, the waves are guided along a physical path; examples are
twisted pair, coaxial cable, and optical fiber.
• Unguided media provide a means for transmitting electromagnetic waves but do
not guide them; examples are propagation through air, vacuum, and sea water.
• A guided transmission medium
• point-to-point: first, it provides a direct link between two devices and,
second, those are the only two devices sharing the medium.
• Multipoint: more than two devices share the same medium
• The basic processes takes place on the signal before transmission through different
transmission medias are encoding, modulation, and multiplexing.
Data transmission can be analog or digital
➢Data transmission can be can be analog or digital
➢Analog data are continuous and take continuous values/an infinite number of
values in a range
➢Digital data have discrete states and take discrete values/only a limited
number of values

Transmission Impairment
✓ Signals travel through transmission media, which are not perfect
✓ The imperfection causes signal impairment
✓ This means that the signal at the beginning of the medium is not the same as the
signal at the end of the medium
✓ What is sent is not what is received. Three causes of impairment are attenuation,
distortion, and noise.
• Attenuation means a loss of energy.

Attenuation
Distortion
• Distortion means that the signal changes its form or shape.
• Distortion can occur in a composite signal made of different
frequencies.
Noise
• Noise is another cause of impairment
• Several types of noise, such as thermal noise, induced noise, crosstalk, and impulse noise,
may corrupt the signal.
→Thermal noise is the random motion of electrons in a wire which creates an extra signal
not originally sent by the transmitter.
→Induced noise comes from sources such as motors and appliances.
• These devices act as a sending antenna, and the transmission medium acts as the receiving
antenna.
→Crosstalk is the effect of one wire on the other. One wire acts as a sending antenna and
the other as the receiving antenna.
→Impulse noise is a spike (a signal with high energy in a very short time) that comes from
power lines, lightning, and so on.
Cont…
Cont.
Key data transmission terms
1. Encoding
• Encoding is the process of mapping bits onto signals.
• Most of time encoding is performed by a network adaptor—a piece of hardware
that connects a node to a link
• When signals propagate over physical links, the main task is:
• to encode the binary data that the source node wants to send into the signals
that the links are able to carry.
• to decode the signal back into the corresponding binary data at the receiving
node.
• non-return to zero (NRZ), non-return to zero inverted (NRZI), Manchester and 4B/5B
encoding
Cont.
Non-return to zero (NRZ) encoding
• map the data value 1 onto the high signal and the data value 0 onto
the low signal.
• The figure schematically depicts the NRZ-encoded signal (bottom) that
corresponds to the transmission of a particular sequence of bits (top).
Cont.
Problems with NRZ encoding
• Several consecutive 1s means that the signal stays high on the link for an extended period of time and
consecutive 0s means that the signal stays low for a long time.
• There are two fundamental problems caused by long strings of 1s or 0s.
• Baseline wander
• The receiver keeps an average of the signal it has seen so far, and then uses this average to distinguish
between low and high signals.
• Whenever the signal is significantly lower than this average, the receiver concludes that it has just seen a
0, and likewise, a signal that is significantly higher than the average is interpreted to be a 1.
• The problem is that too many consecutive 1s or 0s cause this average to change, making it more difficult
to detect a significant change in the signal.

• Clock recovery problem

• The sender’s and the receiver’s clocks have to be precisely synchronized in order for the receiver to
recover the same bits the sender transmits.
• Clock recovery depends on having lots of transitions in the signal, no matter what data is being sent.
Cont.
non-return to zero inverted (NRZI)
• The sender make a transition from the current signal to encode a 1 and
stay at the current signal to encode a 0.
• This solves the problem of consecutive 1s, but obviously does nothing
for consecutive 0s.
Cont.
Manchester encoding
• 1 is encoded as a low-to-high transition and 0 being encoded as a
high-to-low transition.
• Because both 0s and 1s result in a transition to the signal, the clock
can be effectively recovered at the receiver.
• The problem with the Manchester encoding scheme is that it doubles
the rate at which signal transitions are made on the link, which
means that the receiver has half the time to detect each pulse of the
signal.
• In the case of the Manchester encoding, the bit rate is half the baud
rate, so the encoding is considered only 50% efficient.
• Both NRZ and NRZI could have been able to transmit twice as many
bits in the same time period.
Differential Manchester
❑ It combines the ideas of RZ and NRZ-I.
❑ There is always a transition at the middle of the bit, but the bit values are
determined at the beginning of the bit.
❑ If the next bit is 0, there is a transition; if the next bit is 1, there is none.
❑ The transition at the middle of the bit provides synchronization
Alternate Mark Inversion (AMI)
• A common bipolar encoding scheme is called bipolar alternate mark
inversion (AMI).
• In the term alternate mark inversion, the word mark comes from
telegraphy and means 1. So AMI means alternate 1 inversion.
• A neutral zero voltage represents binary 0.
• Binary 1s are represented by alternating positive and negative voltages.
• AMI is commonly used for long-distance communication, but it has a
synchronization problem when a long sequence of 0’s is present in the
data.
• By using different scrambling technique can solve this problem.
Pseudo ternary
• A variation of AMI encoding is called pseudo ternary in which the 1 bit is encoded
as a zero voltage and the 0 bit is encoded as alternating positive and negative
voltages.
4B/5B Cont.
• Attempts to address the inefficiency of the Manchester encoding
without suffering from the problem of having extended durations of
high or low signals.
• The idea of 4B/5B is to insert extra bits into the bit stream so as to
break up long sequences of 0s or 1s.
• Every 4 bits of actual data are encoded in a 5-bit code that is then
transmitted to the receiver; hence the name 4B/5B.
• The 5-bit codes are selected in such a way that each one has no more
than one leading 0 and no more than two trailing 0s.
• The resulting 5-bit codes are then transmitted using the NRZI
encoding.
• the code is only concerned about consecutive 0s—NRZI already
solves the problem of consecutive 1s.
• Note that the 4B/5B encoding results in 80% efficiency.
CONT.
2. Data Transmission Media
• Data Transmission Medias are categorized into:
• Guided – wire

• the medium is more important

• Unguided - wireless

• the bandwidth produced by the antenna is more important

Guided Transmission Media

• Twisted Pair

• Coaxial cable

• Optical fiber
CONT.
Twisted Pair
Cont.

Twisted Pair - Applications

• Most common medium
• Telephone network
• Between house and local exchange (subscriber loop)
• Within buildings
• To private branch exchange (PBX)
• For local area networks (LAN)
• 10Mbps or 100Mbps
• Pros
• Cheap
• Easy to work with
▪ Cons
→ Low data rate
Cont.
Unshielded and Shielded TP

• Unshielded Twisted Pair (UTP)

• Ordinary telephone wire
• Cheapest
• Easiest to install
• Suffers from external EM interference
• Shielded Twisted Pair (STP)
• Metal braid or sheathing that reduces interference
• More expensive
• Harder to handle (thick, heavy)
Cont.
Coaxial Cable
Cont.
Coaxial Cable Applications
• Most versatile medium
• Television distribution
• Ariel to TV
• Cable TV
• Long distance telephone transmission
• Can carry 10,000 voice calls simultaneously
• Being replaced by fiber optic
• Short distance computer systems links
• Local area networks
Optical Fiber Cont.

Figure 3.7: Optical fiber

Cont.
Optical Fiber - Benefits
• Greater capacity
• Data rates of hundreds of Gbps
• Smaller size & weight
• Lower attenuation
• Electromagnetic isolation
• Greater repeater spacing
• 10s of km at least
• Applications
• Long-haul trunks
• Metropolitan trunks
• Rural exchange trunks
• Subscriber loops
• LANs
Unguided Transmission Media Cont.
• Wireless transmission
• Transmission and reception via antenna
• Frequencies
➢2GHz to 40GHz
• Microwave
• Highly directional
• Point to point
• Satellite
➢30MHz to 1GHz
• Omni directional
• Broadcast radio
➢3 x 1011 to 2 x 1014
• Infrared
• Laser
Cont.
3. MULTIPLEXING
• Whenever the bandwidth of a medium linking two devices is
greater than the bandwidth needs of the devices, the link can be
shared. Multiplexing is the set of techniques that allows the
simultaneous transmission of multiple signals across a single data
link. As data and telecommunications use increases, so does traffic.
Frequency-Division Multiplexing (analog signals)
Wavelength-Division Multiplexing (Optical signals)
Time-Division Multiplexing (Digital signals)
4. Data Switching
• The switching system is a collection of switching elements arranged and
controlled in such a way as to setup a communication path between any two
distant points.
• There are three main types of switching namely a circuit switching, packet
switching, and cell switching.
• The switching technique used in computer communication network or data
transfer is packet switching.
• The switching technique used in PSTN is circuit switching.
• The switching technique used in Mobile communication is cell switching.
• These switching techniques differs in the way the resource (path) is
allocated (established).
Cont.