Introduction

Digital communication systems have been studied for many decades, and they have become an integral part of the technological world we live in. Many excellent books in recent years have told the story of this communication revolution, and have explained in considerable depth the theory and applications. Since the late 1990s particularly, there have been a number of significant contributions to digital communications from the signal processing community. This book presents a number of these recent developments, with emphasis on the use of filter bank precoders and equalizers. Optimization of these systems will be one of the main themes in this book. Both multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems and single-input single-output (SISO) systems will be considered. It is assumed that the reader has had some exposure to digital communications and signal processing at the introductory level. Many text books cover this prerequisite, and some are mentioned at the beginning of Sec. 1.5.

Before we describe the contents of the book we first give an introductory description of analog and digital communication systems in the next few sections. The scope and outline of the book will be described in Sec. 1.5.