Until not long ago, a typical electrical engineer interested in signal processing and communications problems worked mostly on problems of analog filter design, antenna design, design of codes and modulators, and other "continuous" issues related to signaling over a gaussian channel; a typical computer scientist however would have simply not been interested in signal processing, and his work in communications would have been limited to the design of protocols for data transmission over networks that were only starting to emerge. That is, they lived in separate worlds. But that is no longer the case. The exponential growth of the Internet and of the World Wide Web in recent years, the steady decrease in the cost of hardware, the maturity reached by the fields of digital signal processing and digital communications, and the ubiquity of low-cost connectivity, have all combined to create significant interest in areas common to CS and EE. Today, our typical engineer must deal with software issues that until not long ago belonged in the realm of "pure" CS, whereas our typical computer scientist needs to be aware of properties of the data his protocols manipulate (i.e., digital signals), so that these protocols can deliver the quality of service required by applications. In line with this view, our main goal in this class is the study computer networks, but from the perspective of one particular application: the reliable transport of coded digital signals.

Next offering: Spring 2005 -- and thereafter referred to as ECE 446.

Previous offerings: Fall 2002, Fall 2003.