Principle of Communications is the first course to communication systems for undergraduate students, and it aims to uncover how a communication system works and the underlying beautiful theoretical principles. It builds the foundations for students to explore more advanced topics related to communications, ranging from theoretical development to practical implementation, such as wireless communications, wireless networks, Internet of Things, etc.. Lectures are developed to answer the following key question: how to reliably deliver information over an unreliable physical medium?

Towards answering this question, we begin with the interface between the cyber and the physical world and explain how to convert from digital to analog and vice versa. Next, we introduce a first statistical model, the additive noise channel, that captures the unreliable feature of physical medium, and develop the principle for optimal reconstruction based on statistical decision theory. Some concepts of compressing analog and digital information will be introduced for communicating or storing information on capacity limited medium. Then, we will introduce the key concept of coding in order to achieve reliable communication. These principles are extended to further channel models, namely, wireline (telephone) channel and wireless channel, where additional challenges such as inter-symbol interference (ISI) need to be tackled. Some system design concepts to counter or take advantage of the channel effects.

Topics to cover
1. Introduction
2. Review of Signals and Systems
3. Analog Modulation
4. Probability and Random Process
5. The Effect of Noise
6. Information Sources and Source Coding
7. Digital Modulation
8. Digital Transmission through Bandlimited Channels
9. Channel Capacity and Error Control Coding