Preface

Summary

Wireless communications is a broad and dynamic field that has spurred tremendous excitement and technological advances over the last few decades. The goal of this book is to provide readers with a comprehensive understanding of the fundamental principles underlying wireless communications. These principles include the characteristics and performance limits of wireless systems, the techniques and mathematical tools needed to analyze them, and the insights and trade-offs associated with their design. Current and envisioned wireless systems are used to motivate and exemplify these fundamental principles. The book can be used as a senior- or graduate-level textbook and as a reference for engineers, academic and industrial researchers, and students working in the wireless field.

ORGANIZATION OF THE BOOK

Chapter 1 begins with an overview of wireless communications, including its history, a vision for the future, and an overview of current systems and standards. Wireless channel characteristics, which drive many of the challenges in wireless system design, are described in Chapters 2 and 3. In particular, Chapter 2 covers path loss and shadowing in wireless channels, which vary over relatively large distances. Chapter 3 characterizes the flat and frequency-selective properties of multipath fading, which change over much smaller distances – on the order of the signal wavelength. Fundamental capacity limits of wireless channels along with the capacity-achieving transmission strategies are treated in Chapter 4. Although these techniques have unconstrained complexity and delay, they provide insight and motivation for many of the practical schemes discussed in later chapters.