An introduction to several fundamental ideas in electrical engineering and computer science, using digital communication systems as the vehicle. The three parts of the course - bits, signals, and packets - cover three corresponding layers of abstraction that form the basis of communication systems like the Internet.

The course teaches ideas that are useful in other parts of EECS: abstraction, probabilistic analysis, superposition, time and frequency-domain representations, system design principles and trade-offs, and centralized and distributed algorithms. The course emphasizes connections between theoretical concepts and practice using programming tasks and some experiments with real-world communication channels.
(from ocw.mit.edu)