How Does A Wireless Network Work?

Everything from semiconductors to pumps and electronic home appliances works with the help of wires. While the invention of wheel truly holds its righteous place in the development of mankind, wires or conductors are equally important in making human race achieve what it has accomplished today. Although wires have made us reach where we are today, further progress in technology and invention required us to look for alternatives in the form of wireless technology.

Working on radio waves, wireless technology has changed our present and is changing our future to make it bigger and better than ever before. With the ability to cover areas like a house or a college campus, wireless networking can be used to impart instant communication at places that are in constant need of being connected with the outside world.

Simply said, with the help of radio signals, computers are able to transmit data in binary code wirelessly to wireless routers which in turn enable it to be connected with the internet or with other devices. A binary code is nothing but a series of zeros and ones that are understood by the computer; these zeros and ones form the basis of all the information processed by the computer. All these transmitted signals can be regarded as beeps that do not fall within the range of human hearing capability and thus we are unaware of them.

Users who are more familiar with the working of Morse code should be in a better position to understand about wireless networking and its working. Like a Morse code works by translating each dot and dash to a meaningful character, the signals in wireless networking also work by doing something similar. A computer uses machine language and understands machine language only, whatever we input in our system gets stored in machine language only. While using a computer to transmit data wirelessly, the data that is stored in the form of a combination of zeros and ones (binary) is sent to the wireless router to be transmitted to the desired location.

Now, the obvious question to ask is about the efficiency of wireless networking as compared to wired data transfers.  Although a computer can transmit data efficiently through wireless methods, efficient and reliable data transfer is often disrupted by disturbances in the signal quality from external sources. While errors are one of the problems faced by wireless communications they are certainly not the only one. Wireless networking also suffers from reduced range and its lower capacity of data transfer.

Wireless transmissions in wireless networking use high bandwidth frequencies to perform data transfers. While a higher data rate is determined by higher frequency, this never makes sure that the data will remain error free. The greater the frequency the smaller is its range, that’s why all wireless networks use optimum frequencies so that a decent amount of signal range is maintained with an equally decent data transfer speed.

For reliable performance, wireless networks use ‘frequency hopping’ that allows frequent changing of frequencies so a so prevent data from data thefts and also to keep safe from frequencies of other appliances like mobile phones and microwaves.
While the above information can form a base to your wireless networking knowledge, you can take further references from internet or through wireless networking books.