Physical Layer for WN.doc

The physical layer deals with transporting bits between two machines. How do we communicate 0’s and 1’s across a medium? By varying some sort of physical property such as voltage or current. Moreover, by representing the property as a function of time, we can analyze it mathematically. Our goal is to understand what happens to a signal as it travels across some physical media. That is, will the receiver see the exact same signal generated by the sender? Why or why not? Fourier showed that a periodic function g(t) can be represented mathematically as an infinite series of sines and cosines: 1. f is the function’s fundamental frequency 2. T = 1/f is the function’s period 3. an and bn are the amplitudes of the nth harmonics The series representation of g(t) is called its Fourier series expansion. In communications, we can always represent a data signal using a Fourier series by imagining that the signal repeats the same pattern forever. Moreover, we can compute the coefficients an and bn. For instance, suppose we use voltages (on/off) to represent 1s and 0s, and we transmit the bit string The signal would look as follows: Similarly, And Points to note about the Fourier expansion: 1. The more terms in the expansion, the more exact our representation becomes. 2. The expression represents the amplitude or energy of the signal (e.g., the harmonics contribution to the wave). In our example, the amplitude consists of an and continually gets smaller. (The bn term is always zero.) Here, as in most cases, the first harmonics are the most important ones. So what does this have to do with data communication? The following facts are important: 1 Signals attenuate (strength of signal falls off with distance) during transmission. How much attenuation occurs? The exact amount is dependent on physical properties of the medium. 2 Distortion results because attenuation is non-uniform across the frequency spectrum; some frequencies distort more