Communications Engineering Laboratory
General Information
Contact: Egke Chatzimoustafa
PIK(at)iks.rwth-aachen.de
All documents are available for download in the RWTHmoodle learning room.
RWTHonline: WS 2024/2025
This course is primarily taught in German.
Time Slots
In winter term 2024/2025 the laboratory takes place on Thursday. There is an early time slot (10:15–13:15) and a late slot (14:15–17:15).
The laboratory will not be offered in the summer term anymore.
Evaluation
The results of the evaluation of the last years are summarized below.
These results include 10 experiments at 9 different institutes.
The "Communications Engineering Laboratory" comprises 10 experiments. It is jointly held by the following Institutes:
- Institute of Communication Systems (IKS)
- Institute for Hearing Technology and Acoustics (IHTA)
- Institute for High Frequency Technology (IHF)
- Chair of Information Theory and Data Analytics (INDA)
- Institute of Integrated Photonics (IPH)
- Chair of Integrated Analog Circuits (IAS)
- Chair for Distributed Signal Processing (DSP)
- Chair of Intelligent Control Systems (IC)
- Institute for Networked Systems (iNets).
Experiments 1 and 2 are supervised by IKS.
Experiment 1: Differentielle Puls Code Modulation (DPCM)
Contact: Egke Chatzimoustafa
Location: Room 209 ("Seminarraum") at IKS, Muffeter Weg 3a, 52074 Aachen, Germany
Differential Pulse Code Modulation (DPCM) is a well-known method of digital signal coding in speech and image processing. It is used for example in digital telephone systems or in various compact disc formats to encode speech or audio signals. DPCM exploits the correlation between adjacent samples and tries to predict the actual sample value based on previous samples. Since differences between samples are expected to be smaller than the actual sampled value, a lower bit rate is required to represent the differences.
Experiment Description:
In this lab, the participants will learn about the underlying principle of DPCM, the predictive differential coding, for the special case of speech signals. There are eight different experiments, starting with some basic studies of a first-order DPCM system and ending with a comparison of different state-of-the-art adaptive DPCM systems. In order to carry out the experiment of the practical course, a simulation environment based on the signal processing software MATLAB and SIMULINK is used.
Additional Information:
In preparation of this lab, the participant has to work through a script and some preliminary problems have to be solved.
Experiment 2: Kanalcodierung und digitale Modulation
Contact: Lars Thieling
Location: Room 209 ("Seminarraum") at IKS, Muffeter Weg 3a, 52074 Aachen, Germany
The objective of each message transmission over a disturbed channel is an error free transfer of information. While the task of source coding is the elimination of redundancy in the signal, channel coding adds redundancy to the signal. This is used for the detection and the correction of possible channel distortions in the channel decoder and is called Forward Error Correction (FEC). The source coding should be optimally adapted to the signal with all output bits having the same information content, whereas the channel coding considers the special properties of the transmission channel and adjusts the type and the complexity of the additional redundancy accordingly.
The experiment deals with the different methods and problems of channel coding and digital modulation, e.g., as in the Global System for Mobile Communication (GSM).
Additional Information:
In preparation of this lab, the participant has to work through a script and some preliminary problems have to be solved.