Introduction to Wireless Access Technologies
Kuok-Shoong Daniel Wong · 2011
This chapter focuses on wireless personal communications systems, where there are many mobile devices that connect to the network through base stations. It provides foundations more specifically relevant to wireless access technologies. The chapter first reviews digital signal processing, then explores digital communications over wireless links. Next, it discusses the revolutionary cellular concept. The cellular concept was a technological breakthrough, introducing many base stations to cover the service region, but with base stations covering only a small portion of the service region. The chapter then focuses on the single-user case of spread spectrum with one transmitter and one receiver. One of the reasons for using spread spectrum is that in a multitransmitter environment it can be designed to be comparable to conventional systems in terms of bandwidth efficiency. The chapter finishes by discussing orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM) for wireless communications. Controlled Vocabulary Terms digital communication; digital signal processing; frequency division multiplexing; spread spectrum communication; wireless communication