Advantages of Digital Communication
- The effect of distortion, noise and interference is less in a digital communication system. This is because the disturbance must be large enough to change the pulse from one state to the other.
- Regenerative repeaters can be used at fixed distance along the link, to identify and regenerate a pulse before it is degraded to an ambiguous state.
- Digital circuits are more reliable and cheaper compared to analog circuits.
- The Hardware implementation is more flexible than analog hardware because of the use of microprocessors, VLSI chips etc.
- Signal processing functions like encryption, compression can be employed to maintain the secrecy of the information.
- Error detecting and Error correcting codes improve the system performance by reducing the probability of error.
- Combining digital signals using TDM is simpler than combining analog signals using FDM. The different types of signals such as data, telephone, TV can be treated as identical signals in transmission and switching in a digital communication system.
- We can avoid signal jamming using spread spectrum technique.
Disadvantages of Digital Communication:
- Large System Bandwidth:- Digital transmission requires a large system bandwidth to communicate the same information in a digital format as compared to analog format.
- System Synchronization:- Digital detection requires system synchronization whereas the analog signals generally have no such requirement.
