Channel capacity

Imagine you have a magic toy box and you want to fill it up with as many toys as possible. The box can only fit a certain number of toys, but how many toys it can fit depends on the size of the toys.

Similarly, a communication channel is like a toy box for information. It can only handle a certain amount of information at one time, and how much information it can handle depends on how much "space" there is in the channel.

To measure how much information a channel can handle, we use something called "channel capacity." This is like measuring how big the toy box is, but instead of measuring in inches or centimeters, we use something called "bits per second."

Think of a bit like a tiny piece of information. It's like a little letter in a word, or a pixel in a picture. When we talk about channel capacity, we're measuring how many bits per second the channel can handle.

So just like a small toy box might only be able to fit a few big toys, a slow communication channel might only be able to handle a few bits per second. But a big toy box can fit lots of small toys, and a fast communication channel can handle lots of little bits per second.

So when we talk about channel capacity, we're measuring how much information can pass through the channel at once, just like how many toys can fit in a toy box.