Data Encoding

A modem (modulator-demodulator) converts digital data to analog signal. There are 3 ways to modulate a digital signal on an analog carrier signal.

1. Amplitude shift keying (ASK): is a form of modulation which represents digital data as variations in the amplitude of a carrier wave. Two different amplitudes of carrier frequency represent '0' , '1'.

 2.       Frequency shift keying (FSK): In Frequency Shift Keying, the change in frequency define different digits. Two different frequencies near carrier frequency represent '0' ,''1'. 

3.       Phase shift keying (PSK): The phase of the carrier is discretely varied in relation either to a reference phase or to the phase of the immediately preceding signal element, in accordance with data being transmitted. Phase of carrier signal is shifted to represent '0' , '1'. 

Digital data to digital signals

A digital signal is sequence of discrete , discontinuous voltage pulses. Each pulses a signal element. Encoding scheme is an important factor in how successfully the receiver interprets the incoming signal.

Encoding Techniques

Following are several ways to map data bits to signal elements.

• Non return to zero(NRZ) NRZ codes share the property that voltage level is constant during a bit interval. High level voltage = bit 1 and Low level voltage = bit 0. A problem arises when there is a long sequence of 0s or 1s and the volatage level is maintained at the same value for a long time. This creates a problem on the recieving end because now, the clock synchronization is lost due to lack of any transitions and hence, it is difficult to determine the exact number of 0s or 1s in this sequence.

 

The two variations are as follows:

1. NRZ-Level: In NRZ-L encoding, the polarity of the signal changes only when the incoming signal changes from a 1 to a 0 or from a 0 to a 1. NRZ-L method looks just like the NRZ method, except for the first input one data bit. This is because NRZ does not consider the first data bit to be a polarity change, where NRZ-L does.
2. NRZ-Inverted: Transition at the beginning of bit interval = bit 1 and No Transition at beginning of bit interval = bit 0 or vicecersa. This technique is known as differential encoding.

NRZ-I has an advantage over NRZ-L. Consider the situation when two data wires are wrongly connected in each other's place.In NRZ-L all bit sequences will get reversed (B'coz voltage levels get swapped).Whereas in NAZ-I since bits are recognized by transition the bits will be correctly interpreted. A disadvantage in NRZ codes is that a string of 0's or 1's will prevent synchronization of transmitter clock with receiver clock and a separate clock line need to be provided.

• Biphase encoding: It has following characteristics:
1. Modulation rate twice that of NRZ and bandwidth correspondingly greater. (Modulation is the rate at which signal level is changed).
2. Because there is predictable transition during each bit time,the receiver can synchronize on that transition i.e. clock is extracted from the signal itself.
3. Since there can be transition at the beginning as well as in the middle of the bit interval the clock operates at twice the data transfer rate.

Types of Encoding -->

o   Biphase-manchester: Transition from high to low in middle of interval = 1 and Transition from low to high in middle of interval = 0

o   Differential-manchester: Always a transition in middle of interval. No transition at beginning of interval=1 and Transition at beginning of interval = 0

o      4B/5B Encoding: In Manchester encoding scheme , there is a transition after every bit. It means that we must have clocks with double the speed to send same amount of data as in NRZ encodings. In other words, we may say that only 50% of the data is sent. This performance factor can be significantly improved if we use a better encoding scheme. This scheme may have a transition after fixed number of bits instead of every other bit. Like if we have a transition after every four bits, then we will be sending 80% data of actual capacity. This is a significant improvement in the performance. 

     This scheme is known as 4B/5B. So here we convert 4-bits to 5-bits, ensuring at least one transition in them. The basic idea here is that 5-bit code selected must have : 

• one leading 0
• no more than two trailing 0s

          Thus it is ensured that we can never have more than three consecutive 0s. Now these 5-bit codes are transmitted using NRZI coding thus problem of consecutive 1s is solved.

            The exact transformation is as follows :

4-bit Data	5-bit code	4-bit Data	5-bit code
0000	11110	1000	10010
0001	01001	1001	10011
0010	10100	1010	10110
0011	10101	1011	10111
0100	01010	1100	11010
0101	01011	1101	11011
0110	01110	1110	11100
0111	01111	1111	11101

Of the remaining 16 codes, 7 are invalid and others are used to send some control information like line idle(11111), line dead(00000), Halt(00100) etc. 

There are other variants for this scheme viz. 5B/6B, 8B/10B etc. These have self suggesting names. 

           o   8B/6T Encoding: In the above schemes, we have used two/three voltage levels for a signal. But we may altogether use more than three voltage levels so that more than one-bit could be send over a single signal. Like if we use six voltage levels and we use 8-bits then the scheme is called 8B/6T. Clearly here we have 729(3^6) combinations for signal and 256(2^8) combinations for bits. 

Bipolar AIM: Here we have 3 voltage levels: middle,upper,lower 

• Representation 1: Middle level =0 Upper,Lower level =1 such that successive 1's will be represented alternately on upper and lower levels.
• Representation 2 (pseudo-ternary): Middle level =1 Upper,Lower level=0 

Analog data to digital signal:

       The process is called digitization. Sampling frequency must be at least twice that of highest frequency present in the the signal so that it may be fairly regenerated. Quantization - Max. and Min values of amplitude in the sample are noted. Depending on number of bits (say n) we use we divide the interval (min,max) into 2(^n) number of levels. The amplitude is then approximated to the nearest level by a 'n' bit integer. The digital signal thus consists of blocks of n bits.On reception the process is reversed to produce analog signal. But a lot of data can be lost if fewer bits are used or sampling frequency not so high.

• Pulse code modulation(PCM): Here intervals are equally spaced. 8 bit PCB uses 256 different levels of amplitude. In non-linear encoding levels may be unequally spaced. 

• Delta Modulation(DM): Since successive samples do not differ very much we send the differences between previous and present sample. It requires fewer bits than in PCM.