What is wireless communication?
Data or
information transferred from point A to B without any wire or dedicated cables
is called wireless communication.
Mother Nature
is doing wireless communication for millions of years*. Let me give few real examples of how nature
does wireless communication:
a
a) When you make an eye contact with other
person, the light bouncing off from your body will enter into other person’s
eyes, then inside their eyes millions of light sensitive rods and cones or
photoreceptor neuron receives and transfers it to brain, where your actual picture
is drawn.
b) When you are talking to other person,
vocal cord\folds in your body, generates pressure in the air, that converted
into sound waves and enters into the ears, then ear drum vibrates and converts
into electrical signal then passed it to brain and different part of brain
processes it.
In both the scenario,
main point is humans are doing wireless communication unconsciously.
If you are
one of the smart people, you might have asked this question, ‘how come I can hear and understand multiple
sounds at a time, like car honking, hearing voices people passing by, etc. at
the same time’ trick is all these sounds have different hertz or frequency of sound waves. So ear drum vibrates differently
for different sounds waves’ frequency.
That’s it,
wireless communication in simple sentences:
“A gentleman says hello to a lady, his vocal
cord generates a sound wave and her ear drum receives sound waves and processes
it.
“A transmitter antenna, encodes information and generates radio waves by vibrating electrons,
then radio waves travels at the speed of light , when it its receiver antenna,
information will be decoded”.
Compare above
both the sentences lot of similarities, isn’t it? When you are stuck in traffic jam, you turn on
the radio station. It follows same principle transmitter antenna broadcast and
a receiver antenna in your car receives and plays it.
The very key
point here is at what hertz the radio waves are broad casted. Don’t worry hertz
is simple words for a second how many time it rotates or vibrates. Basically
sender and receiver should know the language which they are talking about.
Let’s get little bit technical:
Electricity,
Automation, Wireless communication … all these things boils down to “Electromagnetic Spectrum” after understanding this spectrum
led to revolution in wireless communication.
There are two
types of wireless communication, analog and digital. Analog, all nature communication is analog which is continuous in
time and value, ex: sun light. Digital
is discrete in both time and value.
After the
dawn of transistors and integrated circuits, it revolutionized the wireless communication,
after this point of time, wireless means mostly digital wireless.
Below flow path
explains steps inside modern wireless communication system:
Analog
Signal -> ADC -> Signal Processing -> DAC -> Analog Signal
What is this 1G, 2G, 3G, 4G and now 5G?
In simple
words, A telecom company called X, which has setup of lot of cell sites or
antennas, and users who want to pay for wireless service like talk or text,
subscribes to X’s wireless services. With this setup is in place, here is all
what that Gs does as follow:
1G
(first generation): user can send and receive couple kb bytes – approx.
4G,
user can send and receive few Megabytes – approx.
5G,
user can send and receive few Giga bytes – approx.
So basically
in 1G user can send and receive just text msg’s but in 5G user can send and receive HD videos, high res pics
etc.
PS: I am trying to simplify the
technology into simple English words and approximating the measurement or units.
This is not for any references, just to create the abstraction of complex ideas
into simple real life examples and intention is to reach technology to wider
audiences.
