As cellular telephones become commonplace business tools, interest in wireless technology is booming. This book responds to that demand with a comprehensive survey of the field, suitable for educational or technical use. Materials are drawn from academic and business sources, numerous journals, and an IEEE professional reader. Extensively illustrated, Wireless Communications is filled with examples and problems, solved step by step and clearly explained.Wireless Communications covers the design fundamentals of cellular systems, including issues of frequency reuse, channel assignments, radio propagation, and both analog and digital modulation techniques. Speech coding, channel coding, diversity, spread spectrum, and multiple access are also discussed. A separate chapter is devoted to wireless networking, including SS7 and ISDN.Beyond theory,Wireless Communications offers practical reference sections, * Complete technical standards for cellular, cordless telephone, and personal communications systems * International standards for Europe, the Americas, and the Asia-Pacific region * Noise figure calculations and Gaussian approximations of spread spectrum CDMA interference * Mathematical tables, identities, and the Q, erf, and erf functions * Glossary of abbreviations and acronyms * Full list of references This book is designed for use in graduate and undergraduate classrooms, but is also suitable for use by professional engineers and technicians. It can be used for both teaching and reference, and is also appropriate for the interested cellular phone consumer who wants to understand the technology.
I have read the South Asian edition. Explanation on multiple access technologies could come before chapters on cellular network. That is why it remained highly unclear what the first part of the course was trying to deliver. Moreover, confronted with many an unacceptable and callous error which I did not see in its international version. The congested citation style e.g. [Cou93] is much unreadable. I don't know who proposed this style. It has largely been an obsolete practice in electrical and electronics engineering literature very logically.
Review of the first edition. This book is a standard in the field. While the first edition is pretty 'old', it is every bit as applicable today. While I'm sure newer editions closes any gap and fixing minor editing errors, it still contains a complete collection of foundation principles needed to understand these complex systems. It covers nearly all of the processes in good detail for a 2000 or 3000 or level communication engineering undergraduate course. For example, the handoff is covered in several paragraphs introducing what the process is, how it fits into the larger architecture, but doesn't explain exactly how it happens at the architecture level. That is not a fault, though, just an example as to the scope of the book. In some ways, this actually details GSM processes, CDMA, or radio wave propagation better than many books specifically written for specific topics.
I tend to rate 3 to 5 stars as I don’t bother with books that aren’t acceptable to the subject. 3 stars means it is a good book, but there are better treatments of the subject matter or contains structural problems in the text. 4 stars means the book is great and I use it regularly in projects/research. 5 stars is reserved for top 10-20% on a given shelf that abstracted a particularly difficult idea in an easy to understand manner (i.e. it blew my mind) or I have a hard time completing my work without it.