Summer Semester 2005
Seminar: “Digital Broad- and Datacasting”
Digital television and digital radio have begun to succeed their analog archetypes. Compared to their predecessors a lot of new features have been enabled by switching to digital: Increased mobility, drastically improved handling of fading and echoes, new network structures (Single Frequency Networks), robustness and a lot more. Recently the broadcast infrastructures have also increasingly been used for datacasting, combining low data rate digital communication links with high data rate multicast downlinks.
This seminar wants to give an introduction to the various deployed digital broadcast and datacast systems as for example Digital Audio Broadcast (DAB), Digital Multimedia Broadcast (DMB), Digital Video Broadcast (DVB), Digital Radio Mondiale (DRM), XM Radio, Sirius Radio, IP-TV. It will also introduce datacast systems like Astra’s Satellite Internet Service or Eutelsat’s Opensky™.
Purpose: Besides the training in literature / web study and the generation of a report and an oral presentation on a specific subject the seminar as a whole will introduce to you the variety of available digital broad- and datacast services and their technology.
Required Education: Seminar credit points account for your main study period. Therefore Bachelor / Vordiplom is recommended.
Telecommunications II / “Audio/Visual Communications & Networks”
(Nachrichtentechnik II / Digitale Kommunikationsnetze)
Remark: The course will be given in English in case this will be recommended by the participants in the first lesson.
Audio/Visual Communications & Networks will deepen your knowledge on modern communications systems. It will focus on wireless systems since from a telecommunications perspective the combination of audio/visual data – meaning inherently high data rate and putting high requirements on the realtime capabilities of the underlying network – and wireless transmission – that is unreliable and highly dynamic with respect to the channel characteristics and its capacity – is the most demanding application domain.
The lecture will build on the foundation layed as well in “Signals and Systems / Signale und Systeme” as in “Digital Transmission and Signal Processing / Digitale Übertragungstechnik und Signalverarbeitung” and it will apply the building blocks introduced there onto the various communications systems. The course will aim at being self-contained, however, it will not be able to repeat basic mathematical concepts and tools introduced in Telecommunications I.
As the basic principle the course will study and introduce the building blocks of wireless communication systems. Multiple access schemes like TDMA, FDMA, CDMA and SDMA are introduced, antennas and propagation incl. link budget calculations are dealt with and more advanced channel models like MIMO are investigated. Modulation and error correction technologies presented in Telecommunications I will be expanded by e.g. turbo coding and receiver architectures like RAKE and BLAST will be introduced. A noticable portion of the lecture will present existing and future wireless networks and their extensions for audio/visual data. Examples include 802.11 (with the TGe Quality of Service extensions), 802.16a and the terrestrial DVB system (DVB-T, DVB-H).
Required Education: “Audio/Visual Communications & Networks” is a course during the main study period and by such requires a solid foundation of mathematics (differential and integral calculus) and probability theory. The course will build on the mathematical concepts and tools tought in Telecommunications I while trying to enable everyone to follow and to fill gaps by an accelerated study of the accompanying literature. “Signals and Systems” as well as “Digital Transmission and Signal Processing” are strongly recommended but not required.