What are the basic characeristics of a cellular network?

Answer 1

The primary requirement for a network to succeed as a cellular network is for it to have developed a standardised method for each distributed station to distinguish the signal emanating from its own transmitter from the signals received from other transmitters.

One solution method is frequency division multiple access. FDMA works by using varying frequencies for each neighbouring cell. By tuning to the frequency of a chosen cell the distributed stations can avoid the signal from other cells.

Another form is code division multiple access (CDMA). This method is more complex, but achieves the same result; the distributed transceivers can select one cell and listen to it.