Vistas in astronomy, Vol. 12 (The Henry Norris Russel memorial volume),: Arthur Beer (Ed.). 426 pages, diagrams, 714 x 934 in. New York, Pergamon Press, 1971. Price, $8.60 (approx. £11).
✍ Scribed by Zdeněk Kopal
- Publisher
- Elsevier Science
- Year
- 1973
- Tongue
- English
- Weight
- 201 KB
- Volume
- 295
- Category
- Article
- ISSN
- 0016-0032
No coin nor oath required. For personal study only.
✦ Synopsis
Reviews readable short course in detection and estimation, pulse modulation and filtering. Many parts are done sufficiently well to allow inclusion into a graduate level course on modulation. However, this reviewer would rather have seen some consideration of suboptimal but simple schemes and some discussion of relative costs or complexity to place the adjective "optimal" in perspective. In addition to the standard topics there is a detailed treatment of search procedures. This material is new to most communications engineers and is applied in the next part of the book to synchronization acquisition. The usual model of a communications system factors the processing into two steps. The concern of "communications theory" is primarily that of modulationdemodulation, the mapping of a digital sequence into waveforms suitable for transmission on the available channel and the corresponding inverse mapping. The "information theoretic" view of the system focuses on the digital data processing of the original source in preparation for channel transmission. This involves the removal of unwanted redundancy by source coding, the insertion of controlled redundancy to allow error detection/correction and the insertion of structure to aid in synchronization. Part 2 deals basically with the modulation-demodulation view and the corresponding problems of clock or carrier synchronization and symbol synchronization. The behavior of synchronization schemes relying on separate synchronization channels or modes and those deducing synchronization directly from the received information bearing waveform is developed and contrasted. Part 3 covers the coding facet of communications systems and the corresponding problems of word and frame synchronization. This part contains treatments of well-known topics such as noiseless source encoding and linear channel codes. Noticeably absent in this standard material is any discussion of the Viterbi algorithm as a maximum likelihood decoder. The reasonably wellknown material of synchronizable variable length and block codes is presented between the chapters on noiseless source encoding and error correcting codes. The