Cell Definition

A narrow confining room, as in a prison or convent.

A small enclosed cavity or space, such as a compartment in a honeycomb or within a plant ovary or an area bordered by veins in an insect's wing.

Any of the smallest organizational units of a group or movement, as of a Communist party.

A very small, complex unit of protoplasm, usually with a nucleus, cytoplasm, and an enclosing membrane: all plants and animals are made up of one or more cells that usually combine to form various tissues.

A hermit's hut.

To store in a honeycomb.

To live in or share a prison cell.

In radio systems, a relatively small geographical area of coverage determined by factors such as frequency band, power level, and line of sight (LOS).The formal concept of radio cells dates back to 1947, when Bell Telephone engineers developed a radio system concept that included numerous, low-power transmit/receive antennas positioned throughout a metropolitan area. This sort of architecture served to increase the effective subscriber capacity of radio systems by breaking the area of coverage into cells, or smaller areas of coverage. Thereby, each frequency band could be reused in nonadjacent cells. Additionally, the cells can be split, or subdivided, further as the traffic demands of the system increase. In the context of radio telephony, including cellular telephony, cells can be characterized as falling into three broad descriptive categories, as illustrated in Figure C-2.