COMS4105

Communication Systems

School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science
The University of Queensland
Brisbane, Australia

In this course we use Github.
Content relating to the setting up the low-cost software defined radios (SDRs) is available publically.

Who is this course for?

COMS4105 is taken by a diverse set of students mostly from the School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. This includes both engineering and computer science students, from both undergraduate and postgraduate cohorts.

The curriculum is intentionally structured to accommodate and bridge two distinct foundational backgrounds, you only need one or the other:

  • Systems & Signal Processing: A background in the signals and systems or mathematical concepts.
  • Software & Programming: A background in programming and some experience with either Python or MATLAB.

Most practical exercises require only a few lines of code!

Time domain and Frequency domain signals, and the effect of noise.

Communication systems need to handle the effect of noise.

Highlights of the course

Real-world signals and systems

Real-world modern day communication systems like Wi-Fi, 5G, and 6G, are all based on the foundations of modulation and coding. In this course you will see how these signals are formed, and how they enable data to be transmitted simultaneously.

Spectum of 802.11n transmitting at 72Mbits/sec

The spectrum of WiFi signals has a distinct shape.

How error correction and compression work

To enable a communication system to work efficiently both source and channel coding is used. An example of source encoding is Huffman coding. Meanwhile channel coding can include simple codes like parity and Hamming, Convolutional coding to advanced coding schemes like Reed-Solomon and LDPC.

A convolutional decoder trellis using the Viterb algorithm

Practical Communications: SDR

This course uses Software Defined Radios (SDR) so you can experiment with real signals which travel over the air. Each student will have access to their own SDR based on the RTL2832U chip. This is a low cost SDR which has a generous tuning range and reasonable instantaneous bandwidth that plugs in with USB.

RTL2832U based SDR