Wireless communication how does it work

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Links are provided in External Resources at the end of this document. When setting up your wireless network, you will need to think about what frequency band to use, and what channel to use. Many people want to know how far wireless signals will go.

Knowing this is important for planning a network, as the power of the routers will affect the design of the network, and how much equipment is needed. Different Wi-Fi routers can have very different power levels. Some are much stronger: they have more speaking or transmitting power than others. Some are very good listeners: they have what is called a better receive sensitivity. These two elements define how well wireless devices will connect, and how far away a receiving Wi-Fi router can be.

In some cases, usually with more business or professional oriented equipment you can find the information for transmit power and receive sensitivity. For instance, a light bulb might be 40 watts. A router will have an output power of mW, which is times less! A dBm is a relative measurement using logarithms. One milliwatt is 0 dBm. This is the scale that many network designers use to calculate if longer wireless links will work.

About 25 to 50 meters. About 50 to meters. About 5 to 10 kilometers. About 10 to 20 kilometers or more. Wireless transmitter power is only one half of the connection. This is also known as the receive sensitivity. The receive sensitivity values are generally rated in dBm, and are usually in the range of dBm to dBm. The negative number indicates a very small signal -- tiny fractions of a milliwatt. Below we have an example of two routers in relatively close range.

They have a good connection because the signal strength between them is strong. Below, we can see the same routers, but with more distance between them.

In this case, the routers have a weaker connection because the signal is near the limit of what the routers can hear. The speed between the routers will be less.

The optimal signal range for outdoor wireless equipment is between dBm and dBm. This will ensure the connection can maintain the highest bandwidth possible. Wireless routers have different types of antennas. Some routers will have antennas built in, and sometimes the routers will have a choice of antenna you can attach to the router. There are many specific types of antennas, but three basic types are used most of the time, and will be useful in building a wireless network.

The first type of antenna is also the most common--omnidirectional. Using omnidirectional antennas has the benefit of creating connections in any direction.

If there is enough signal between nodes, they should connect. The all-direction strength of these antennas comes with the drawback of transmitting a weaker signal. Since the signal is going in all directions, it spreads out and gets weaker with distance very fast.

If nodes or clients are far away, they may not connect well. Also, if there are only nodes or clients in one direction of the router, then the signals going in the opposite direction are wasted:. The next type of antenna is known as directional--it sends out a signal in a more focused way. There are two main types of directional antennas:. Sector Antenna Focused Antenna Sector antennas send out a pie-shaped wedge of signal - it can be anywhere between 30 degrees and degrees wide.

These are often long, rectangular antennas that are separate or integrated in to a router. A focused antenna sends out a narrow beam of signal - it is normally around 5 to 10 degrees wide, but it can be a little wider as well. These are often dishes or have a mesh bowl reflecting signal behind them. Satellite Communication Systems offer telecommunication Satellite Phones , positioning and navigation GPS , broadcasting, internet, etc.

Other wireless services like mobile, television broadcasting and other radio systems are dependent of Satellite Communication Systems. Perhaps, the most commonly used wireless communication system is the Mobile Phone Technology. The development of mobile cellular device changed the World like no other technology. The latest generation of Mobile Communication Technology is 5G which is indeed successor to the widely adapted 4G. Apart from increased data transfer rates technologists claim data rates in the order of Gbps , 5G Networks are also aimed at Internet of Things IoT related applications and future automobiles.

GPS is solely a subcategory of satellite communication. GPS provides different wireless services like navigation, positioning, location, speed etc. Bluetooth is another important low range wireless communication system.

It provides data, voice and audio transmission with a transmission range of 10 meters. Almost all mobile phones, tablets and laptops are equipped with Bluetooth devices.

They can be connected to wireless Bluetooth receivers, audio equipment, cameras etc. Although it is considered an obsolete technology, paging was a major success before the wide spread use of mobile phones. Paging provides information in the form of messages and it is a simplex system i.

Wi-Fi is one of the widely used wireless network, usually for internet access but sometimes for data transfer within the Local Area Network. It is very difficult to imagine the modern World without Wi-Fi. Infrared Communication is another commonly used wireless communication in our daily lives.

It uses the infrared waves of the Electromagnetic EM spectrum. Infrared IR Communication is used in remote controls of Televisions, cars, audio equipment etc. A brief overview on Wireless Communication, Advantages and Disadvantages, Different Types of Wireless Communication and also some important applications. If you feel we missed something or if you have a good point about wireless communication, please share so that other readers might find it useful.

I enjoyed reading your article and learning more about the applications of wireless communication! As students the reference is very important for citing our work.

Please do well to be providing the source of the information. For a wireless network explain the different ways or signals that are used in a wireless network namely infrared, microwaves, satellite, Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, radio wave. The contents were very useful but you can also update the current affairs in this sector and you can also gives out an prediction or suggestion that how it may be developed in future and i hope that this might be useful.

The way u defined all these terms are really easy to understand.. Your email address will not be published. Wireless Communication: Introduction, Types and Applications. April 3, By Ravi Teja. What is the best wireless module should i go for like NRF 24L01?

On their way, waves suffer different attenuation and delay. Receiver captures all of them as a combined signal. When there is more than one route between transmitter and receiver, we call such channel a multipath channel. We know, that receiver must deal with the distorted and mixed signal to decode the data.

This is not a trivial task since captured signal contains a big amount of unwanted components. To make this task easier we take some additional steps in the transmitter. Before sending user data, transmitter is performs encoding.

This operation appends additional bits to the message, which makes data recovery in receiver easier. After encoding bits are mapped onto symbols, modulated and passed to the antenna. In this blogpost we covered overview of wireless.

Starting from where we most commonly use it, where it begins and how it travels in the environment. In the end we discussed one way to deal with channel conditions like pathloss and multipath, namely channel encoding. To see other posts on network and wireless fundamentals — for example about pathloss , shadowing or MIMO — see our explained section.

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