Bits, Signals and Packets: An Introduction to Digital Communication and Networks

An introduction to several fundamental ideas in electrical engineering and computer science, using digital communication systems as the vehicle. The three parts of the course—bits, signals and packets—cover three corresponding layers of abstraction that form the basis of communication systems like the Internet.The course teaches ideas that are useful in other parts of E.E.C.S.: abstraction, probabilistic analysis, superposition, time and frequency-domain representations, system design principles and trade-offs and centralized and distributed algorithms. The course emphasizes connections between theoretical concepts and practice using programming tasks and some experiments with real-world communication channels.