Humans have always used communication systems: first with smoke signals, and then with the telegraph and telephone. These systems and their technological advances have changed our lifestyle profoundly.

Nowadays, smartphones enable us to make calls, watch videos and use social networks, and with this comes the emergence of the connected man and the wider applications of smart objects. All current and future communication systems rely on a digital communication chain that consists of a source and a destination separated by a transmission channel, which may be a portion of a cable, an optical fiber, a wireless mobile or satellite channel. Whichever the channel, the processing blocks implemented in the communication chain have the same basis.

Here the authors deal with source coding and channel coding. After a presentation of the fundamental results of information theory, the different lossless and lossy source coding techniques are studied. Then, error-correcting-codes (block codes, convolutional codes and concatenated codes) are theoretically detailed and their applications provided.

A second volume, Digital Communications 2, concerns the blocks located after channel coding in the communication chain. It first presents baseband and sine waveform transmissions.