What is Bandwidth?

Bandwidth

Bandwidth is a central concept in many fields, including information theory, radio communications, signal processing, and spectroscopy.

DEFINITION 1: Bandwidth

Is a measure of frequency range, measured in hertz.

EXAMPLE

The range of frequencies within which the performance of the antenna, with respect to some characteristics, conforms to a specified standard. (2.4-2.5GHz antenna has 100MHz bandwidth).

DEFINITION 2: Bandwidth

The amount of data that can be transmitted in a fixed amount of time, expressed in bits per second(bps) or bytes per second.

EXAMPLE

A V.90 modem supports a maximum theoretical bandwidth of 56 Kbps. Fast Ethernet supports a theoretical maximum bandwidth of 100 Mbps.

According to the Shannon-Hartley theorem, the data rate of reliable communication is directly proportional to the frequency range of the signal used for the communication. In this context, the word bandwidth can refer to either the data rate or the frequency range of the communication system (or both).

Bandwidth is a key concept in many applications. In radio communications, for example, bandwidth is the range of frequencies occupied by a modulated carrier wave, whereas in optics it is the width of an individual spectral line or the entire spectral range.

There is no single universal precise definition of bandwidth, as it is vaguely understood to be a measure of how wide a function is in the frequency domain. For different applications there are different precise definitions. For example, one definition of bandwidth could be the range of frequencies beyond which the frequency function is zero. This would correspond to the mathematical notion of the support of a function (i.e., the total “length” of values for which the function is nonzero). Another definition might not be so strict and ignore the frequencies where the frequency function is small. Small could mean less than 3 dB below (i.e., less than half of) the maximum value, or it could mean below a certain absolute value. In short, as with any definition of the width of a function, there are many definitions available, which are suitable for different applications.

Analog systems

For analog signals, which can be mathematically viewed as a function of time, bandwidth is the width, measured in hertz, of a frequency range in which the signal’s Fourier transform is nonzero. This definition can be relaxed wherein bandwidth would be the range of frequencies that the signal’s Fourier transform has a power above a certain threshold, say 3 dB within the maximum value, in the frequency domain. Bandwidth of a signal is a measure of how rapidly it fluctuates with respect to time. Hence, the greater the bandwidth, the faster the variation in the signal. The word bandwidth applies to signals as described above, but it could also apply to systems. In the latter case, to say that a system has a certain bandwidth is a short-hand for saying that the transfer function of the system has a certain bandwidth. As an example, the 3 dB bandwidth of the function depicted in the figure is f2 ? f1, whereas other definitions of bandwidth would yield a different answer.

Figure 1:

-3dB bandwidth)

The fact that real baseband systems have both negative and positive frequencies can lead to confusion about bandwidth, since they are sometimes referred to only by the positive half, and one will occasionally see expressions such as B = 2W, where B is the total bandwidth, and W is the positive bandwidth. For instance, this signal would require a lowpass filter with cutoff frequency of at least W to stay intact. The bandwidth of an electronic filter is the part of the filter’s frequency response that lies within 3 dB of the response at the center frequency of its peak. In signal processing and control theory the bandwidth is the frequency at which the closed-loop system gain drops to ?3 dB. In basic electric circuit theory when studying Band-pass and Band-reject filters the bandwidth represents the distance between the two points in the frequency domain where the signal is frac1sqrt2 of the maximum signal strength. In photonics, the term bandwidth occurs in a variety of meanings:

• the bandwidth of the output of some light source, e.g., an ASE source or a laser; the bandwidth of ultrashort optical pulses can be particularly large


• the width of the frequency range that can be transmitted by some element, e.g. an optical fiber


• the gain bandwidth of an optical amplifier


• the width of the range of some other phenomenon (e.g., a reflection, the phase matching of a nonlinear process, or some resonance)


• the maximum modulation frequency (or range of modulation frequencies) of an optical modulator


• the range of frequencies in which some measurement apparatus e.g., a powermeter) can operate


• he data rate (e.g., in Gbit/s) achieved in an optical communication system

What is Bandwidth?