Wireless Communication

Wireless communications is one of the most active areas of technology development of our time. This development is being driven primarily by the transformation of what has been largely a medium for supporting voice telephony into a medium for supporting other services, such as the transmission of video, images, text, and data. Thus, similar to the developments in wireline capacity in the 1990s, the demand for new wireless capacity is growing at a very rapid pace. Although there are, of course, still a great many technical problems to be solved in wireline communications, demands for additional wireline capacity can be fulfilled largely with the addition of new private infrastructure, such as additional optical fiber, routers, switches, and so on. On the other hand, the traditional resources that have been used to add capacity to wireless systems are radio bandwidth and transmitter power. Unfortunately, these two resources are among the most severely limited in the deployment of modern wireless networks: radio bandwidth because of the very tight situation with regard to useful radio spectrum, and transmitter power because mobile and other portable services require the use of battery power, which is limited.