Historical Sketch of Wireless Communications
Haesik Kim · 2015
This chapter traces through successive stages of wireless communications development in technical and economical aspects. Smoke signals used by Indian tribes are considered to be the start of wireless communication systems. J. C. Maxwell, in early 1860s, described how electromagnetic waves propagate and predicted that the speed of electromagnetic wave is the same as that of the light waves. V. H. MacDonald's "The cellular concept", produced another landmark concept and overcame many problems in wireless communication system such as power consumption, coverage, user capacity, spectral efficiency, and interference. The chapter outlines the advent of personal wireless communication device such as pagers and digital 2G and 3G systems. While it took 150 years to build the current cellular system from telegraph, it took only 20 from Global System for Mobile Communications (GSM# to Long-Term Evolution-Advanced #LTE-A). The data rate has become the key metric to evaluate wireless communication systems.