507214 - WIRED AND WIRELESS COMMUNICATION SYSTEMS

courses

ID:

507214

Duration (hours):

50

CFU:

SSD:

TELECOMUNICAZIONI

Year:

2025

Date/time interval

Primo Semestre (29/09/2025 - 16/01/2026)

Course Objectives

Give students the knowledge to understand problems and technical solutions to operate a communication system. Impact of the environment and of the service type on the preferable solution. Description of the main commercial systems with reference to the studied techniques. It is assumed that students don’t have any background in telecommunications, and will be more interested in their exploitation in industrial environments. As a consequence, the theoretical aspects will be limited and focus will be on application examples. At the end of the course, it is expected that the student will know:
- The physical principles that affect a transmission system
- The transmission techniques and their effectiveness in presence of above mentioned phenomena
- Effects of the interaction between different users and services
- The reasons behind the choices of different techniques in different systems
- The performance that can be achieved and the factors influencing them
All this with the final aim to give students the tools to analyze requirements and consequently adopt a conscious choice based on the requested service.

Course Prerequisites

None specific

Teaching Methods

Class talks given with the support of slides and integrated with the use of blackboard for specific topics.

Assessment Methods

Exam is composed by a written and an oral part. The written part is composed by 4 questions to be answered in 1 hour. The questions are partly oral and partly composed of short numerical examples to characterize and dimsion proposed systems. Aim of the written exam is to verify the ability of the student to put in evidence and explain the main points of the topics of the course providing a clear synthesis in the short time available. The oral starts with a discussion of the writte part and tends to verify the more general understanding of the relationship between the different topics. Grade is sum of grades in oral and written parts (max grade written 17, max grade oral 17). Admission to oral exam is subject to a grade ≥8 in the written test. Note that oral must also be ≥8 to pass.
Students are graded based on clarity and completeness of the answers. During the oral also the ability to reason about andd motivate the choices.

Texts

Slides, Links, selected papers and book chapters.
Useful texts:
-William Stallings, DATA AND COMPUTER
COMMUNICATIONS
Eighth Edition, Pearson Prentice Hall
- J. Kurose, K. Ross, "Computer Networking: A Top-Down Approach." Pearson

Characterization of signals:
- Characterization in time
- Characterization in frequency
- Statistical properties
Characterization of transmission impairments. Propagation phenomena and how to design efficient transmission techniques. Transmission over radio channels. Attenuation, multipath, fading, doppler effect, crosstalk.

Review of transmission techniques (analog and digital) analog to digital conversion, transmission of baseband digital data: robustness to noise and bandidth efficiency.

Introduction to traffic theory for performance characterization and system planning. Kendall's notation, Little's result, transition matrix and state probabilities for Markov systems, birth death processes, examples.

Circuit switched networks: space, time and hybrid circuit switched nodes. Minimization of crosspoints. Blocking probability. Signaling, in-band, out-of band, common channel. Multiplexing in circuit switched networks frequency (FDM), time (TDM) and code (CDM). Duplexing.

Packet switched networks. The ISO/OSI reference model, protocols and interfaces. Line management, link configuration, packet extraction, error control (FEC and ARQ). Sample protocols: HDLC, PPP.
Distributed multiplexing in packet networks: Aloha, Slotted-Aloha, CSMA/*, Token passing.

Local packet based systems. Wired and Wireless Local Arean Networks (LAN) in the IEEE 802 set of standards.
Short range and sensor networks.
Networks and applications in industrial environments

Wide area packet networks. Historical perspective, Frame relay and ATM networks. Quality of service concepts. Internet architecture and protocols (IP, TCP, UDP). Evolution and convergence to IP based networks.