I would really like to know what happens when Im driving down a highway at say 60mph and browsing the web on my smartphone (or well let's say my wife is doing the driving and Im browsing the web :-) ). What kind of communication is happening between me and the cellphone towers? What data is my phone sending to the different cellphone towers as I drive by them? How does the cellphone tower send that data to the internet?
Does someone have a good pointer to a resource that would answer these questions?
Almost everything is exactly the same as on your desktop computer. The only thing that's different is what goes on under your TCP/IP layers.
Your Phone has a modem built in, that modulates a digital signal over a carrier wave at a certain frequency (set of frequencies, depending on the channel access protocol) the modulated carrier wave is sent out to the cellphone tower.
When the modem is supposed to receive, when it's allowed to send, how it negotiates these things is all strictly defined by protocols the telecom industry has standardized on. I can't say I'm an expert on these protocols, there's a whole bunch of them. They are grouped in protocol stacks with familiar names like GPRS, EDGE, UMTS, LTE.
These protocols besides making optimal use of their available bandwidth taking into account all kinds of noise, disturbances, moving from tower to tower, other phones also specify how the communication should be encrypted.
The encoding/decoding of these protocols is usually done by an integrated circuit in your phone that's separate from the rest of the phone's functionality, to prevent you from tampering with it (and to ensure reliability I guess). So all your phone's general operating system has to do is interface with that circuit to get neat IP packets.
Like tinco said, above TCP/IP it's pretty much the same as on your desktop. If you want to know about TCP/IP and below, I suggest this title: "From GSM to LTE-Advanced: An Introduction to Mobile Networks and Mobile Broadband".
