Qualifier Applications open for January 2027 term, Last date to Apply: January 29, 2027

Qualifier Applications open for January 2027 term, Last date to Apply: January 29, 2027

Degree Level

Communication Systems

The objective of this course is to introduce the fundamental concepts, techniques, and architectures of analog and digital communication systems, enabling students to understand signal transmission, modulation, reception, noise, demodulation, data communications, wireless networks, satellite communications, and optical fiber systems, and to evaluate their performance using modern communication engineering principles.

by Prof. Bhaskar Ramamurthi , Prof. Radha Krishna Ganti

Course ID: EE4103

Course Credits: 4

Course Type: Degree

Pre-requisites: EE3101 -  Digital Signal Processing

What you’ll learn

At the end of this course, students will be able to: Explain the operation and performance metrics of a variety of communication systems.
Analyze communication signals in time and frequency domains using Fourier techniques.
Apply sampling, digitization, and modulation principles to communication systems.
Evaluate the effects of noise, interference, and bandwidth limitations on communication system performance
Analyze digital communication schemes and their bit error rates
Understand the fundamentals of wireless, cellular, satellite, and optical communication systems

Course structure & Assessments

For details of standard course structure and assessments, visit Academics page.

WEEK 1 Communication system fundamentals; analog and digital communication, communication resources, and power–bandwidth–noise trade-offs.
WEEK 2 Signal representation; sinusoids, phasors, Fourier series, spectra, modulation, and complex baseband signals.
WEEK 3 Sampling and digitization; sampling theorem, ADC/DAC, anti-aliasing, oversampling, and quantization noise
WEEK 4 Analog modulation techniques; AM, DSB-SC, SSB, coherent detection, and optical on-off keying.
WEEK 5 Angle modulation; FM, PM, Carson's rule, PLL demodulation, and bandwidth–SNR trade-offs.
WEEK 6 Radio receiver fundamentals; receiver architectures, noise, antenna gain, impedance matching, and link budgets.
WEEK 7 Digital communication basics; synchronization, packet communication, error detection, ARQ, UART, and line coding.
WEEK 8 Inter-symbol interference and pulse shaping; Nyquist criterion, raised-cosine filters, eye diagrams, and matched filtering.
WEEK 9 Digital modulation; BPSK, BFSK, QPSK, QAM, BER, SNR, and channel capacity.
WEEK 10 Cellular communication systems; wireless channels, handover, link budgets, and OFDM.
WEEK 11 Satellite and optical communication; LEO/GEO satellites, link budgets, fiber optics, WDM, and coherent communication.
+ Show all weeks

Prescribed Books

The following are the suggested books for the course:

Simon Haykin, Communication Systems, 4th ed., John Wiley & Sons, 2001

S. Haykin & M. Moher, Communication Systems, 5th ed., Wiley, 2009

B. P. Lathi & Z. Ding, Modern Digital and Analog Communication Systems, 4th ed., Oxford Univ. Press, 2009 2. J. G. Proakis & M. Salehi, Communication Systems Engineering, 2nd ed., Pearson, 2002

About the Instructors

Prof. Bhaskar Ramamurthi
Professor Emeritus, Electrical Engineering Department, IIT Madras

Prof. Bhaskar Ramamurthi received his B.Tech. degree in Electronics from IIT Madras in 1980, and his

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M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Electrical Engineering from the University of California, Santa Barbara, in

1982 and 1985, respectively. After working at AT&T Bell Laboratories for a couple of years, he joined

the faculty of his alma mater in 1986. He served as the Director of IIT Madras from 2011 to 2022 and

was the Zoho Chair Professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering. He is currently Professor

Emeritus in the same department.

His areas of specialisation are Communications and Signal Processing. His research work is in Wireless

Networks, Modulation, Wireless Data, and Audio and Video Compression. He heads the Centre of

Excellence in Wireless Technology, located at the IIT-M Research Park, which is focused on emerging

wireless standards and technologies. He is a holder of several patents related to 4G and 5G technologies

and was the national co-ordinator for the project to build an end-to-end 5G Test Bed.

He is a Fellow of the INAE, USNAE and IEEE, and Hon. Fellow of RWTH Aachen, Germany.

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Prof. Radha Krishna Ganti
Professor, Electrical Engineering, IIT Madras

Prof. Radha Krishna Ganti received his B.Tech. and M.Tech. degrees in Electrical Engineering from the

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Indian Institute of Technology Madras, and his M.S. in Applied Mathematics and Ph.D. in Electrical

Engineering from the University of Notre Dame in 2009. His doctoral research focused on the spatial

analysis of interference networks using tools from stochastic geometry. He is a co-author of the

monograph Interference in Large Wireless Networks (NOW Publishers, 2008).

He received the IEEE Stephen O. Rice Prize and the IEEE Leonard G. Abraham Prize in 2014, and the

IEEE Communications Society Young Author Best Paper Award in 2015. He was also awarded the

Institute Research and Development Award (IRDA) by IIT Madras for the academic year 2016–2017.

In 2019, he was conferred the TSDSI Fellowship for technical excellence in standardization activities

and for his contributions to the Low Mobility Large Cell (LMLC) use case in the International

Telecommunication Union (ITU). He served as the lead Principal Investigator from IIT Madras in the

development of a 5G base station as part of the Department of Telecommunications (DoT)-funded 5G

Testbed Project.

In 2024, he was honored with the Rashtriya Vigyan Puraskar – Vigyan Yuva (Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar)

Award by the Hon’ble President of India, Smt. Droupadi Murmu, in recognition of his exceptional

contributions to Engineering Sciences and wireless communications.

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