Channel (communications)

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This article is about channels specific to communications. For other uses, see channel.

Channel, in communications (sometimes called communications channel), refers to the medium used to convey information from a sender (or transmitter) to a receiver.

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[edit] Overview

A Channel can take many forms. Examples of communications channels include:

  1. A connection between initiating and terminating nodes of a circuit.
  2. A buffer from which messages can be put and gotten. See Actor model and process calculi for discussion on the use of channels.
  3. A single path provided by a transmission medium via either
  4. A path for conveying electrical or electromagnetic signals, usually distinguished from other parallel paths.
  5. The portion of a storage medium, such as a track or a band, that is accessible to a given reading or writing station or head.
  6. In a communications system, the part that connects a data source to a data sink.
  7. A specific radio frequency or band of frequencies, usually in conjunction with a predetermined letter, number, or codeword, and allocated by international agreement.
    Examples:
    • Wi-Fi consists of unlicensed channels 1-13 from 2412MHz to 2484MHz in 5MHz steps.
    • Television channels such as North American TV Channel 2 = 55.25MHz, Channel 13 = 211.25MHz.
  8. A room in the Internet Relay Chat (IRC) network, in which participants can communicate with each other.

All of these communications channels share the property that they transfer information. The information is carried though the channel by a signal.

[edit] Channel models

A channel can be modelled physically by trying to calculate the physical processes which modify the transmitted signal. For example in wireless communications the channel can be modelled by calculating the reflection off every object in the environment. A sequence of random numbers might also be added in to simulate external interference and/or electronic noise in the receiver.

Statistically a communication channel is usually modelled as a triple consisting of an input alphabet, an output alphabet, and for each pair (i, o) of input and output elements a transition probability p(i, o). Semantically, the transition probability is the probability that the symbol o is received given that i was transmitted over the channel.

Statistical and physical modelling can be combined. For example in wireless communications the channel is often modelled by a random attenuation (known as fading) of the transmitted signal, followed by additive noise. The attenuation term is a simplification of the underlying physical processes and captures the change in signal power over the course of the transmission. The noise in the model captures external interference and/or electronic noise in the receiver. If the attenuation term is complex it also describes the relative time a signal takes to get through the channel (technically called a phase shift). The statistics of the random attenuation are decided by previous measurements or physical simulations.

Channel models may be continuous channel models in that there is no limit to how precisely their values may be defined.

Communication channels are also studied in a discrete-alphabet setting. This corresponds to abstracting a real world communication system in which the analog->digital and digital->analog blocks are out of the control of the designer. The mathematical model consists of a transition probability that specifies an output distribution for each possible sequence of channel inputs. In information theory, it is common to start with memoryless channels in which the output probability distribution only depends on the current channel input.

[edit] Types of communications channels


[edit] See also

[edit] References

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