A communications system allows for the transfer of information from an information source to an information sink. It consists of a transmitter that encodes a message from the information source into a transmitted signal, a channel to carry the signal, and a receiver to decode the signal back into a message for the information sink.
The transmitter may perform operations like modulation, amplification, and filtering on the message signal. The channel can be a wireline medium like coaxial cable or a wireless medium like free space. It is subject to degradation from noise, interference and distortion. The receiver performs complementary operations to the transmitter like demodulation, amplification and filtering to recover the original message from the received signal for the information sink.