Wireless Communications Onramp Overview

Chances are you use some type of wireless communication system every single day. Most wireless communication systems are digital, and in the simplest sense, it means transmitting binary digits over a channel to a receiver. The binary digits can represent just about anything, a phone call, a document, pictures of your pets.

Those bits get transformed into waveforms via modulation, and those waveforms typically get sent over the air. Think Wi-Fi or your mobile phone. The receiver then transforms the waveforms back into bits. In this course, you'll learn how to simulate a wireless communications link in MATLAB. You'll start with quadrature amplitude modulation or QAM, a single carrier modulation scheme.

You'll model a noisy channel and analyze the links performance. Then you'll include filtering to model a more practical QAM system. Next, you'll learn how to model a multi path channel, common in wireless applications. You'll explore how OFDM, a multi carrier modulation scheme, can help compensate for a multi path channel, and finally, you'll implement a practical OFDM system.

To get started, all you need is a web browser. You'll interact with the web based version of MATLAB, where you'll receive step by step instructions and instant feedback. You can also experiment and try things out on your own. You don't need to learn a lot of theory to start simulating communication systems in MATLAB, but you'll get the most out of this course, if you're familiar with a few concepts from signal processing and communications.

Also, it will help if a little bit of MATLAB. You should feel comfortable writing scripts, indexing, calling functions, and setting property values. If you've never used Matlab before or would like to refresh these skills, we recommend you first take MATLAB Onramp to get you up to speed quickly. This course should take about two hours to complete, but you can leave any time and come back later.

And when you're done, you can download a shareable certificate of completion. Start the course today.