Digital Signal Processing in Modern Communication Systems

What Hacker News says

1. bri3dJul 2026
   This is a very good text and regarded as one of the greats for a reason, but it glosses over a lot of lower concepts (like OFDM, which if I recall occupies only a single short chapter) and focuses very heavily on MIMO. Proakis and Salehi ("Digital Communications") and Goldsmith ("Wireless Communications") cover some of the "lower level" concepts like OFDM pretty well in depth from a theory standpoint. Goldsmith is a particularly good middle ground book. A highly underrated book is also Andreas Schwarzinger's "Digital Signal Processing in Modern Communication Systems", which covers how modems for these systems are actually implemented in real life and is quite approachable from an engineering standpoint.
   Show morethread
2. teleforceJul 2026
   >A highly underrated book is also Andreas Schwarzinger's "Digital Signal Processing in Modern Communication Systems", which covers how modems for these systems are actually implemented in real life and is quite approachable from an engineering standpoint.

   The book is now in 2nd edition, and I've both of the 1st and 2nd editions, it's really a masterpiece.

   The 2nd edition covers many of the 'gotchas' of OFDM implementation and covers several error detection and correction techniques, that're not in the 1st edition.

   Show morethread
3. teleforceJan 2024
   Such a hasty generalization. It's not that we don't care about PHY, but expecting in depth PHY treatment in modern networking book is like expecting semiconductor physics in the The Art of Electronics book [1]. Personally PHY is my passion and trying to propose a new reliable PHY waveform to 5G and upcoming 6G standards.

   Modern PHY is like bit twiddling in programming, 99% programmer don't do it and don't care unless you are doing HPC or device driver. In networking those who're doing PHY belong to communication engineering field. For modern networking the relevant PHY mostly dealing with digital I/Q signal for wired/wireless and there are many excellent books on the subject such as this [2].

   [1]The Art of Electronics (2015):

   https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38748370

   [2] Digital Signal Processing in Modern Communication Systems

   https://www.amazon.com/Digital-Signal-Processing-Communicati...

   Show morethread
4. davidhydeApr 2022
   I would begin with the basics of JPEG compression followed by audio compression and then, finally video compression. They are all related in more ways than you think. The 3Blue1Brown YouTube channel has a couple of gems on digital signal processing like how fast Fourier transforms work and everything in between. This is a good modern book on the subject: “Digital Signal Processing in Modern Communication Systems 2nd Edition” released in 2021 by Andreas Schwarzinger.
   Show morethread
5. teleforceJun 2020
   Coincidentally, I've spent countless hours during the Covid-19 isolation looking for good to excellent textbooks on Engineering and Computer Science. Perhaps I can share them in the near future. These are some excellent books based on my findings for your particular requirements.

   1) For general applied and engineering Maths book perhaps you can look into both textbooks by Prof. Kuldeep Singh and they uses Matlab but Octave should be fine [1].

   a) Engineering Mathematics Through Applications b) Linear Algebra

   2) For signal processing especially for communication I'd highly recommend "Digital Signal Processing in Modern Communication Systems" by Andreas Schwarzinger. It introduces the modern communication systems from the first principles to the more applied OFDM systems with examples that can be run using either Matlab or Octave. Just get the book it's really good even if you're not interested in communication systems.

   3) If you want to learn more advanced applied engineering books on signal processing I'd recommend reading books on time-frequency techniques both linear and non-linear. For introduction check the book "Explorations in Time-Frequency Analysis" by Patrick Flandrin. Time-frequency analysis is most probably going to be pervasive very soon for increasing the accuracy of AI and ML by providing better intermediate processing of data features.

   [1] https://maths-for-all.co.uk/

   Show morethread
6. teleforceJan 2022
   This is an excellent book on learning DSP for modern wireless communications and it should get you over the fundamentals [1].

   There is an interesting project for open source LoRa physical layer implementation in GNU Radio. The authors had to reverse engineer the LoRa physical layer for the implementation because it is proprietary unlike the data link layer LoRaWAN part of it [2].

   [1]Digital Signal Processing in Modern Communication Systems:

   https://www.amazon.com/Digital-Signal-Processing-Communicati...

   [2]LoRa PHY based on GNU Radio:

   https://www.epfl.ch/labs/tcl/resources-and-sw/lora-phy/

   Show morethread