Abstract :
Five specifications should be known of an information source: dimensionality; maximum information content and peak rate of information production; average rate of information production auto-correlation function; and statistical fine structure of the source. Various sources are discussed with reference to the specifications. Message encoding is split into two distinct operations : space matching and entropy matching. The former process has to reduce the dimensionality of the message space to match the three-dimensional signal space, the latter has to remove redundancy. Signal formation involves sampling, quantization and pulse modulation. The typical pulse waveforms are compared and their frequency spectra are listed. Signal encoding is considered as a linear transformation of the signal space into the channel space for the sole purpose of matching it to the requirements of a noisy channel of limited bandwidth.
