Some Definitions
Definitions specific to subfields 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, arbitrary binary data streams are not considered as signals, but only analog and digital signals that are representations of analog physical quantities.
In a communication system, a transmitter encodes a message into 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 voltage signal. The signal is transmitted to the receiving telephone by wires; and at the receiver it is reconverted into sounds.
In telephone networks, signalling, 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 even when the signal functions are not continuous; an example is a square-wave signal.
A second important distinction is between discrete-valued and continuous-valued. Digital signals are sometimes defined as discrete-valued sequencies of quantified values, that may or may not be derived from an underlying continuous-valued physical process. In other contexts, digital signals are defined as the continuous-time waveform signals in a digital system, representing a bit-stream. In the first case, a signal that is generated by means of a digital modulation method is considered as converted to an analog signal, while it is considered as a digital signal in the second case.
Read more about this topic: Signal (electrical Engineering)
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