Signal


In signal processing, a signal is a function that conveys information about a phenomenon. In electronics and telecommunications, it refers to any time varying voltage, current or electromagnetic wave that carries information. A signal may also be defined as an observable change in a quality such as quantity.
Any quality, such as physical quantity that exhibits variation in space or time can be used as a signal to share messages between observers. According to the IEEE Transactions on Signal Processing, a signal can be audio, video, speech, image, sonar and radar-related and so on. In another effort to define signal, anything that is only a function of space, such as an image, is excluded from the category of signals. Also, it is stated that a signal may or may not contain any information.
In nature, signals can be actions done by an organism to alert other organisms, ranging from the release of plant chemicals to warn nearby plants of a predator, to sounds or motions made by animals to alert other animals of food. Signalling occurs in all organisms even at cellular levels, with cell signaling. Signaling theory, in evolutionary biology, proposes that a substantial driver for evolution is the ability for animals to communicate with each other by developing ways of signaling. In human engineering, signals are typically provided by a sensor, and often the original form of a signal is converted to another form of energy using a transducer. For example, a microphone converts an acoustic signal to a voltage waveform, and a speaker does the reverse.
Information theory serves as the formal study of signals and their content, and the information of a signal is often accompanied by noise. The term "noise" refers to unwanted signal modifications, but is often extended to include unwanted signals conflicting with desired signals. The reduction of noise is covered in part under the heading of signal integrity. The separation of desired signals from background noise is the field of signal recovery, one branch of which is estimation theory, a probabilistic approach to suppressing random disturbances.
Engineering disciplines such as electrical engineering have led the way in the design, study, and implementation of systems involving transmission, storage, and manipulation of information. In the latter half of the 20th century, electrical engineering itself separated into several disciplines, specialising in the design and analysis of systems that manipulate physical signals; electronic engineering and computer engineering as examples; while design engineering developed to deal with functional design of user–machine interfaces.

Definitions

Definitions specific to sub-fields are common. For example, in information theory, a signal is a codified message, that is, the sequence of states in a communication channel that encodes a message. In the context of signal processing, signals are analog and digital representations of analog physical quantities.
In terms of their spatial distributions, signals may be categorized as point source signals and distributed source signals.
In a communication system, a transmitter encodes a message to create a signal, which is carried to a receiver by the communications channel. For example, the words "Mary had a little lamb" might be the message spoken into a telephone. The telephone transmitter converts the sounds into an electrical signal. The signal is transmitted to the receiving telephone by wires; at the receiver it is reconverted into sounds.
In telephone networks, signaling, for example common-channel signaling, refers to phone number and other digital control information rather than the actual voice signal.
Signals can be categorized in various ways. The most common distinction is between discrete and continuous spaces that the functions are defined over, for example discrete and continuous time domains. Discrete-time signals are often referred to as time series in other fields. Continuous-time signals are often referred to as continuous signals.
A second important distinction is between discrete-valued and continuous-valued. Particularly in digital signal processing, a digital signal may be defined as a sequence of discrete values, typically associated with an underlying continuous-valued physical process. In digital electronics, digital signals are the continuous-time waveform signals in a digital system, representing a bit-stream.
Another important property of a signal is its entropy or information content.

Classification

In Signals and Systems, signals can be classified according to many criteria, mainly: according to the different feature of values, classified into analog signals and digital signals; according to the determinacy of signals, classified into deterministic signals and random signals; according to the strength of signals, classified into energy signals and power signals.

Analog and digital signals

Two main types of signals encountered in practice are analog and digital. The figure shows a digital signal that results from approximating an analog signal by its values at particular time instants. Digital signals are quantized, while analog signals are continuous.

Analog signal

An analog signal is any continuous signal for which the time varying feature of the signal is a representation of some other time varying quantity, i.e., analogous to another time varying signal. For example, in an analog audio signal, the instantaneous voltage of the signal varies continuously with the sound pressure. It differs from a digital signal, in which the continuous quantity is a representation of a sequence of discrete values which can only take on one of a finite number of values.
The term analog signal usually refers to electrical signals; however, analog signals may use other mediums such as mechanical, pneumatic or hydraulic. An analog signal uses some property of the medium to convey the signal's information. For example, an aneroid barometer uses rotary position as the signal to convey pressure information. In an electrical signal, the voltage, current, or frequency of the signal may be varied to represent the information.

Any information may be conveyed by an analog signal; often such a signal is a measured response to changes in physical phenomena, such as sound, light, temperature, position, or pressure. The physical variable is converted to an analog signal by a transducer. For example, in sound recording, fluctuations in air pressure strike the diaphragm of a microphone which induces corresponding electrical fluctuations. The voltage or the current is said to be an analog of the sound.

Digital signal

A digital signal is a signal that is constructed from a discrete set of waveforms of a physical quantity so as to represent a sequence of discrete values. A logic signal is a digital signal with only two possible values, and describes an arbitrary bit stream. Other types of digital signals can represent three-valued logic or higher valued logics.
Alternatively, a digital signal may be considered to be the sequence of codes represented by such a physical quantity. The physical quantity may be a variable electric current or voltage, the intensity, phase or polarization of an optical or other electromagnetic field, acoustic pressure, the magnetization of a magnetic storage media, etc. Digital signals are present in all digital electronics, notably computing equipment and data transmission.
and distortions without necessarily affecting the digits
With digital signals, system noise, provided it is not too great, will not affect system operation whereas noise always degrades the operation of analog signals to some degree.
Digital signals often arise via sampling of analog signals, for example, a continually fluctuating voltage on a line that can be digitized by an analog-to-digital converter circuit, wherein the circuit will read the voltage level on the line, say, every 50 microseconds and represent each reading with a fixed number of bits. The resulting stream of numbers is stored as digital data on a discrete-time and quantized-amplitude signal. Computers and other digital devices are restricted to discrete time.

Energy and power

According to the strengths of signals, practical signals can be classified into two categories: energy signals and power signals.
Energy signals: Those signals' energy are equal to a finite positive value, but their average powers are 0;
Power signals: Those signals' average power are equal to a finite positive value, but their energy are infinite.

Deterministic and random

Deterministic signals are those whose values at any time are predictable and can be calculated by a mathematical equation.
Random signals are signals that take on random values at any given time instant and must be modeled stochastically.

Even and odd

An even signal satisfies the condition
or equivalently if the following equation holds for all and in the domain of :
An odd signal satisfies the condition
or equivalently if the following equation holds for all and in the domain of :

Periodic

A signal is said to be periodic if it satisfies the condition:
or
Where:
= fundamental time period,
= fundamental frequency.
A periodic signal will repeat for every period.

Time discretization

Signals can be classified as continuous or discrete time. In the mathematical abstraction, the domain of a continuous-time signal is the set of real numbers, whereas the domain of a discrete-time signal is the set of integers. What these integers represent depends on the nature of the signal; most often it is time.
A continuous-time signal is any function which is defined at every time t in an interval, most commonly an infinite interval. A simple source for a discrete-time signal is the sampling of a continuous signal, approximating the signal by a sequence of its values at particular time instants.

Amplitude quantization

If a signal is to be represented as a sequence of numbers, it is impossible to maintain exact precision - each number in the sequence must have a finite number of digits. As a result, the values of such a signal belong to a finite set; in other words, it is quantized. Quantization is the process of converting a continuous analog audio signal to a digital signal with discrete numerical values.

Examples of signals

Signals in nature can be converted to electronic signals by various sensors. Some examples are:
Other examples of signals are the output of a thermocouple, which conveys temperature information, and the output of a pH meter which conveys acidity information.

Signal processing

A typical role for signals is in signal processing. A common example is signal transmission between different locations. The embodiment of a signal in electrical form is made by a transducer that converts the signal from its original form to a waveform expressed as a current or a voltage, or an electromagnetic waveform, for example, an optical signal or radio transmission. Once expressed as an electronic signal, the signal is available for further processing by electrical devices such as electronic amplifiers and electronic filters, and can be transmitted to a remote location by electronic transmitters and received using electronic receivers.

Signals and systems

In Electrical engineering programs, a class and field of study known as "signals and systems" is often seen as the "cut class" for EE careers, and is dreaded by some students as such. Depending on the school, undergraduate EE students generally take the class as juniors or seniors, normally depending on the number and level of previous linear algebra and differential equation classes they have taken.
The field studies input and output signals, and the mathematical representations between them known as systems, in four domains: Time, Frequency, s and z. Since signals and systems are both studied in these four domains, there are 8 major divisions of study. As an example, when working with continuous time signals, one might transform from the time domain to a frequency or s domain; or from discrete time to frequency or z domains. Systems also can be transformed between these domains like signals, with continuous to s and discrete to z.
Although S and S falls under and includes all the topics covered in this article, as well as Analog signal processing and Digital signal processing, it actually is a subset of the field of Mathematical modeling. The field goes back to RF over a century ago, when it was all analog, and generally continuous. Today, software has taken the place of much of the analog circuitry design and analysis, and even continuous signals are now generally processed digitally. Ironically, digital signals also are processed continuously in a sense, with the software doing calculations between discrete signal "rests" to prepare for the next input/transform/output event.
In past EE curricula S and S, as it is often called, involved circuit analysis and design via mathematical modeling and some numerical methods, and was updated several decades ago with Dynamical systems tools including differential equations, and recently, Lagrangians. The difficulty of the field at that time included the fact that not only mathematical modeling, circuits, signals and complex systems were being modeled, but physics as well, and a deep knowledge of electrical topics also was involved and required.
Today, the field has become even more daunting and complex with the addition of circuit, systems and signal analysis and design languages and software, from MATLAB and Simulink to NumPy, VHDL, PSpice, Verilog and even Assembly language. Students are expected to understand the tools as well as the mathematics, physics, circuit analysis, and transformations between the 8 domains.
Because mechanical engineering topics like friction, dampening etc. have very close analogies in signal science, many of the tools originally used in ME transformations have now been applied to signals, circuits, systems and their components, analysis and design in EE. Dynamical systems that involve noise, filtering and other random or chaotic attractors and repellors have now placed stochastic sciences and statistics between the more deterministic discrete and continuous functions in the field..
EE taxonomists are still not decided where S&S falls within the whole field of signal processing vs. circuit analysis and mathematical modeling, but the common link of the topics that are covered in the course of study has brightened boundaries with dozens of books, journals, etc. called Signals and Systems, and used as text and test prep for the EE, as well as, recently, computer engineering exams.