Question

What is the role of carrier wave in communication?

Answer 1

When information is being transferred from a transmitter to a receiver, it goes through a channel. A channel can be wire, optic fibre or electromagnetic (EM) waves.

Carrier waves encode the actual information (payload) to be sent by transmitter so that it uses the channel most efficiently.

For example, if I had to send an audio signal (20Hz -20000Hz) through EM waves, without using carrier wave, the required bandwidth is 20000-20 = 19980Hz. If another person wants to send an audio signal simultaniously, he will have to transmit at another band, say 20,001 Hz to 40,000Hz. As you can see this quickly consumes the available spectrum and wastes channel bandwidth.

hope this helps u.....