Meaning of Transmission impairments

The applications of conventional internet were limited to e-mail and WWW. As the time passes by people started using audio video communication in the network. At the early days of internet, the audio video streaming (VOIP) was not smooth as today. The transmission have to deals with various packet loss and transit delay. User feel that delay as buffering. These delays and loss during data transmission on the network (internet) is commonly known as transmission impairments. The impairments can be caused due to several reasons.

Causes of Transmission impairments

1. Jitter: It is the delay in time while transmitting data packets over the network. Change in route and network congestion may cause Jitter. More the jitter poorer with be the quality of communication. i.e audio video streaming.

2. Echo and Singing: When the transmitted signal are fed back to the source again then this is considered as echo as well as singing. They are the repetition of waveform when transmitted signal are coupled into the returned path.

3. Cross talk: This is the effect caused when signal transmitted on one channel creates an unwanted effect in another channel during communication. Simply when one signal is shared in two or more transmission system then there arises cross talk. It reduces the quality of communication.

4. Distortion: The change in original transmitted signal waveform is known as distortion. Due to distortion receiver denote receive the original signal rather distorted signal is received. This reduces quality of communication and is one of the reason for network impairments.

5. Noise: The interference in communication process is called noise. There may be various reason for interference during transmission of data over the network. The most commonly encountered is EMI (Electro Magnetic Interference)

6. Bandwidth: The rate of data transmission in a given medium per unit time is known as bandwidth . It is generally measured in terms of bps, Kbps, Mbps etc. Higher the bandwidth, higher will be the data transmission and faster will be the communication. But if bandwidth is low then it leads to network congestion causing network impairments.