The Importance of Communication

Communication. In its basic sense, a people's ability to communicate determines their survival. The Roman Empire thrived partly due to its massive network of roads that encouraged trade and facilitated communication. More recently, the United States and the Soviet Union established a direct phone line between the two governments to prevent disastrous misunderstandings from developing. Today, we depend upon various methods to transport our words and thoughts. Traditional mail systems, telephones, computers, the Internet, and now wireless networks allow individuals from across the globe to speak with one another.

Wireless transmission may seem revolutionary, but it actually has existed for close to one hundred years. Guglielmo Marconi, an Italian scientist, proved that information could travel over electromagnetic waves. On December 12, 1901, Marconi transmitted Morse code through air over a distance of 2,000 miles. This landmark experiment showed that data could be transmitted by electromagnetic waves over any distance. This discovery initiated an era of invention that would see the creation of radio, radar, and other innovations.

With the advent of computers and digital signal processing in the 1960's and 1970's, studies in information theory proved incredibly fruitful. Utilizing Marconi's revolutionary discovery and the technological advancements of the past fifty years, cellular telephone networks flourished in the late Twentieth Century. Now, engineers seek to transmit not only voice, but also immense quantities of information over wireless networks. Computer networks now depend greatly on wireless transmission to communicate with other computers.

Such an explosion in the development of wireless communication in the Digital Age begs the question: how does one design an effective wireless transmission protocol? Continual experimentation in the last few years have culminated with the use of three prevalent transmission protocols: Frequency Division Multiple Access, Time Division Multiple Access, and Code Division Multiple Access.