Communication Systems
Fall 2026
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News
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Course Outline
The course teaches the fundamentals of digital communication systems. The main topics are analog and digital modulation, signals and linear time-invariant systems, baseband and passband transmission, continuous-time and discrete-time channel models, noise and signal-to-noise ratio (SNR), detection theory, inter-symbol interference and orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM), basics of forward error correction, basics of information theory, multiple-access protocols, and spread-spectrum modulation.
The exercises cover theoretical aspects as well as modeling of simple communication systems in GNU Octave.
Instructors
| Prof. Dr. Christoph Studer | Dr. Stefan M. Moser | |
| Office: | ETZ J83 | ETF E104 |
| Phone: | 044 632 05 44 | 044 632 36 24 |
| E-mail: |  |
 |
Teaching Assistant
tba
Time and Place
- Exercise: Thursday, 08:15–10:00, CAB G11
- Lecture: Thursday, 10:15–12:00, CAB G11
Online Resources
A detailed course schedule (lectures and exercises) and lecture notes will be available on Moodle.
- Moodle: tba
- Syllabus
- Lecture Notes by Jim Massey:
- ADIT 1 contains a detailed description of convolutional codes and the Viterbi decoding algorithm (Chapter 6)
- ADIT 2 contains a detailed summary about groups, fields, and vector spaces in the context of coding theory (Chapter 7) and discusses coding theory (Chapter 8)
- My lecture notes on Information Theory:
- concept of channel capacity (Chapter 11)
- convolution codes (Chapter 13)
- polar codes (Chapter 14)
Special Remarks
The lecture is held in English.
-||- _|_ _|_ / __|__ Stefan M. Moser 
[-] --__|__ /__\ /__ Senior Researcher & Lecturer, ETH Zurich, Switzerland
_|_ -- --|- _ / / Adj. Professor, National Yang Ming Chiao Tung University (NCTU), Taiwan
/ \ [] \| |_| / \/ Web: https://moser-isi.ethz.ch/
Last modified: Wed Aug 19 13:30:18 UTC+0200 2026