Understanding Basic Wireless Concepts

One of the many new blog mini-series I will be rolling out in the next month or two concerns wireless technology and networks.  It is something I am becoming more and more interested in for several reasons.  First, wireless is so incredibly relevant to our time that my intellectual curiosity has naturally led me to want to understand it.  Second, a couple of friends and I have recently noticed a large gap in the space, a technology that needs to be available, yet is not.  In order to properly bring this new technology into being, we need first understand what it is we will be working with.

So for the next few months, a series of posts will be entirely devoted to learning and teaching the basic concepts in wireless technology, from WiFi to cellular networks, from radio & television to the internet, and everything in between.

So stay tuned into Volumnomics to learn some more useful, relevant knowledge about the world around you.

This post will begin with a basic look into the essential components and concepts underlying wireless networks.

First let's look at data.  What kind of data can be sent wirelessly?  Anything really -- from radio and TV signals, to computer data, to even voices and sound bytes.  Radio wave piggybacking gets the information from point A to B.  I'll discuss the Electromagnetic Spectrum in further detail in another post soon.

So how exactly does the information piggyback onto the radio waves?  Well, to do this, we rely on a process called modulation.  We use a modulator to do this.  Naturally, this implies another process, on the receiving end, aptly named demodulation -- a crucial process for extracting the information after it is sent.

Information-piggybacked RF (radio frequency) waves are sent via transmitters and are received by, you guessed it, receivers.  

Cell technology works around the concept of the cell.  Cells are geographic areas divided into separate units. Cell phone communication begins within the cell where the phone resides.  If two cell phones are communicating within the same cell, no long-distance communication need take place.  However, longer distance communication requires more tools.

Every cell has a base station.  This base station acts as a transmitter, forwarding information from the cell phone to other transmitting base stations for as long as the information needs to travel.  The process of moving from cell to cell in this manner is commonly referred to as handoff.

Next post, we'll take a deeper look at the Electromagnetic Spectrum.  What is it exactly?  And why is it so incredibly relevant to every aspect of our lives?