Communication channel
Physical or logical connection used for transmission of information / From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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A communication channel refers either to a physical transmission medium such as a wire, or to a logical connection over a multiplexed medium such as a radio channel in telecommunications and computer networking. A channel is used for information transfer of, for example, a digital bit stream, from one or several senders to one or several receivers. A channel has a certain capacity for transmitting information, often measured by its bandwidth in Hz or its data rate in bits per second.
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Communicating an information signal across distance requires some form of pathway or medium. These pathways, called communication channels, use two types of media: Transmission line-based telecommunications cable (e.g. twisted-pair, coaxial, and fiber-optic cable) and broadcast (e.g. microwave, satellite, radio, and infrared).
In information theory, a channel refers to a theoretical channel model with certain error characteristics. In this more general view, a storage device is also a communication channel, which can be sent to (written) and received from (reading) and allows communication of an information signal across time.