In this section, we will discuss the advantages and disadvantages of digital communication briefly. So let’s start the discussion from the knowledge of Digital Communication.
What is Digital Communication
In digital communication, the message signal to be transmitted is digital in nature. This means that digital communication involves the transmission of information in digital form.
Advantages of Digital Communication
- Digital communication systems are simpler and cheaper compared to analog communication systems because of the advances made in IC technologies.
- In Digital communication, the speech, video, and other data may be merged and transmitted over a common channel using multiplexing.
- using data encryption, only permitted receivers may be allowed to detect the transmitted data. This property is of its most important in military applications.
- Since the transmission is digital and the channel encoding is used, therefore the noise does not accumulate from repeater to repeater in long-distance communications.
- Since the transmitted signal is digital in nature, therefore a large amount of noise interference may be tolerated.
- Since in digital communication, channel coding is used, therefore the errors may be detected and corrected in the receivers.
- Digital communications are adaptive to other advanced branches of data processing such as digital signal processing, image processing and data compression, etc.
Disadvantages of Digital Communication
Although digital communication offers, so many advantages as discussed above, it has some drawbacks also. However, the advantages of digital communication outweigh the disadvantages.
- Due to analog to digital conversion, the data rate becomes high. Therefore more transmission bandwidth is required for digital communication.
- Digital communication needs synchronization in case of synchronous modulation.
