Unless otherwise indicated herein, the description provided in this section is not itself prior art to the claims and is not admitted to be prior art by inclusion in this section.
A typical wireless communication system includes a plurality of cell sites, each configured to provide one or more respective wireless coverage areas such as a cell or cell sectors in which to serve wireless communication devices (WCD) such as cell phones or wirelessly equipped computers. In practice, each cell site may include a respective antenna configuration, as well as respective supporting cell site equipment, which may be coupled in turn with network infrastructure such as routers, switches, gateways, and the like.
With this arrangement, when the supporting cell site equipment receives from the network infrastructure data that is to be transmitted in a wireless coverage area, or the supporting cell site equipment itself generates such data for transmission, the supporting equipment may convert the data into a form suitable for transmission by the antenna configuration, and the antenna configuration may then output the data over the air in the wireless coverage area. For instance, the supporting equipment may encode the data and modulate the encoded data on a radio frequency (RF) carrier, the supporting equipment may then pass the modulated carrier to the antenna configuration for RF transmission, and the antenna configuration may then wirelessly output the modulated carrier.
Likewise, when the antenna configuration wirelessly receives from within such a coverage area a modulated RF carrier representing data, the antenna configuration may pass that modulated RF carrier to the supporting cell site equipment, and the supporting equipment may then process that communication to uncover the underlying data. For instance, the supporting equipment may demodulate the RF carrier to uncover encoded data and may then decode the encoded data to uncover the underlying data. The supporting equipment may then handle the data locally or pass the data along to the network infrastructure for handling, as appropriate.