mobile telephone, also called mobile phone, portable device for connecting to a telecommunications network in order to transmit and receive voice, video, or other data. Mobile phones typically connect to the public switched telephone network (PSTN) through one of two categories: cellular telephone systems or global satellite-based telephony.
Cellular telephones, or simply cell phones, are portable devices that may be used in motor vehicles or by pedestrians. Communicating by radio waves, they permit a significant degree of mobility within a defined serving region that may range in area from a few city blocks to hundreds of square kilometres. The first mobile and portable subscriber units for cellular systems were large and heavy. With significant advances in component technology, though, the weight and size of portable transceivers have been significantly reduced. In this section, the concept of cell phones and the development of cellular systems are discussed.
All cellular telephone systems exhibit several fundamental characteristics, as summarized in the following:
- The geographic area served by a cellular system is broken up into smaller geographic areas, or cells. Uniform hexagons most frequently are employed to represent these cells on maps and diagrams; in practice, though, radio waves do not confine themselves to hexagonal areas, so the actual cells have irregular shapes.
- All communication with a mobile or portable instrument within a given cell is made to a base station that serves the cell.
- Because of the low transmitting power of battery-operated portable instruments, specific sending and receiving frequencies assigned to a cell may be reused in other cells within the larger geographic area. Thus, the spectral efficiency of a cellular system (that is, the uses to which it can put its portion of the radio spectrum) is increased by a factor equal to the number of times a frequency may be reused within its service area.
- As a mobile instrument proceeds from one cell to another during the course of a call, a central controller automatically reroutes the call from the old cell to the new cell without a noticeable interruption in the signal reception. This process is known as handoff. The central controller, or mobile telephone switching office (MTSO), thus acts as an intelligent central office switch that keeps track of the movement of the mobile subscriber.
- As demand for the radio channels within a given cell increases beyond the capacity of that cell (as measured by the number of calls that may be supported simultaneously), the overloaded cell is “split” into smaller cells, each with its own base station and central controller. The radio-frequency allocations of the original cellular system are then rearranged to account for the greater number of smaller cells.
Frequency reuse between discontiguous cells and the splitting of cells as demand increases are the concepts that distinguish cellular systems from other wireless telephone systems. They allow cellular providers to serve large metropolitan areas that may contain hundreds of thousands of customers.