We are all living in the time when Wi-Fi is used by the majority even if they have cables used for some purpose. Ranges from the personal domain to public domain like school, library, airport, restaurant and so on are dominated by wireless networking. It is no surprise to us that why we would prefer wireless network over cable.
Drilling holes in the building, managing cables? Still, the way in which wireless connectivity really works is somewhat of an unknown region or even untouched sector to many of us. Yet, for those who really need to know about it whether for professional or quench the curiosity, let’s deep dive into hows of wireless networking.
Technology behind wireless connection
So how does wireless components connect and communicate with each other? There is no physical wiring between network nodes rather either radio waves or beam of infrared light, electromagnetic radiation is used to serve such purpose. Over the years several kind of wireless networking solutions came and gone. Like any other standard in the world of technology, wireless has its own standard as well. The wireless radio waves we find these days are based on the IEEE 802.11 wireless Ethernet standard primarily marketed as we know, the Wi-Fi as well as for Bluetooth technology.
Wireless networks that used the infrared light are generally limited to Infrared Data Association (IrDA) protocol. Eventually the cell phone companies got it all mixed and started offering access to internet via their cellular networks.
The best thing about the modern devices are that this wireless networking is built-in these computing devices.
Previous technology for connection
In the golden days of evolving network technology infrared transceiver was used which is gone now. This was pretty common in early laptops and personal digital assistance or commonly PDA. The way it worked was you had to put the devices close to each other’s proximity to transfer data between two. These days, smartphone uses this technology to use as a wireless remote control. So with the evolution and rise of the Wi-Fi and Bluetooth, infrared was replaced by these to get the high speed transfer over network. They are typically an integrated component in modern devices, in case if it is not, you can always add-on. For instance, a PCIe WiFi adapter and USB wireless network adapters, Wireless NICs etc. Built-in cellular network is more common in smartphones, tablet, some portable computers.