Radio Communications Protocol

Characteristics of Radio Communications

• Radio communications covers a wide gamut of technologies, including AM/FM and television broadcast systems, cordless and cellular phones and walkie-talkies. Radio systems provide an ideal communications system in situations where users are mobile and in areas where cable installation is difficult. However, the radio spectrum also has bandwidth limitations.
  
  

Types of Radio Communications

• Radio systems may be either circuit oriented or packet oriented, according to the Encyclopedia of Networking and Telecommunications. In a circuit-oriented system, the available bandwidth is divided into smaller bands that emulate circuits, with each user getting a dedicated transmit and receive channel.
  
  

Packet-Oriented Networks

• Packet-oriented networks, on the other hand, allows transmissions from multiple users to be sent over one or more channels or even over the radio system’s entire frequency range. A technique called multiplexing, which combines multiple threads of information on a single transmission path, makes this possible. Several types of multiplexing exist, including frequency division and time division multiplexing.
  
  

Communications Protocol

• Regardless of whether the network utilizes guided or unguided media, communications networks utilize similar protocol concepts. Devices are connected to the transmission medium with an adapter that generates signals for transmitting data. Such devices can be analog or digital in nature. Concepts like bandwidth (the channel’s information-carrying capacity) and throughput (actual measured performance of a system) are also applicable to radio communications.
  
  

Packet Radio Protocols

• Packet radio data networks in particular, used frequently in cellular telephone systems, rely on a base station transmitter/receiver covering a circular area, commonly called a cell. Analog and digital signals are transmitted at various frequencies utilizing various protocols arranged in layers not unlike those used in wired transmissions. Several architecture models employ a physical layer as well as a data link layer, to manage the flow of data and error detection protocols.