The telecommunications industry has seen a rapid boost within the last decade. New realities
and visions of functionalities in various telecommunications networks have brought forward the
concept of next-generation networks (NGNs). The competitions among operators for support-
ing various services, lowering of the cost of having mobile and cellular phones and smartphones,
increasing demand for general mobility, explosion of digital traffic, and advent of convergence
network technologies added more dynamism in the IDEA of NGNs. In fact, facilitating con-
vergence of networks and convergence of various types of services is a significant objective of
NGN
The IDEA of the book was born during the time when the second generation cellular system was looming on the horizon.At that time ,the world was divided into three distinct camps as far as looking for a standard: Europe North America and Japan.
Emergingmarketshaveseenanunprecedentedgrowthinthelastfewyears.Theoperatorfocus
has been on giving complete coverage to all regions (urban to rural) and to subscription to all –
people from the highest to the lowest income groups. When the IDEA is taking coverage for
the remotest of the regions and getting the ‘unconnected–connected’, technology and business
modelling are two important focus areas.
The IDEA of writing this book entitled “Cognitive Networked Sensing and Big Data”
started with the plan to write a briefing book on wireless distributed computing
and cognitive sensing. During our research on large-scale cognitive radio network
(and its experimental testbed), we realized that big data played a central role. As a
result, the book project reflects this paradigm shift. In the context, sensing roughly
is equivalent to “measurement.”
Optical communication technology has been extensively developed over the
last 50 years, since the proposed IDEA by Kao and Hockham [1]. However, only
during the last 15 years have the concepts of communication foundation, that
is, the modulation and demodulation techniques, been applied. This is pos-
sible due to processing signals using real and imaginary components in the
baseband in the digital domain. The baseband signals can be recovered from
the optical passband region using polarization and phase diversity tech-
niques, as well as technology that was developed in the mid-1980s.
Mobile telecommunications emerged as a technological marvel allowing for access to
personal and other services, devices, computation and communication, in any place and
at any time through effortless plug and play. This brilliant IDEA became possible as the
result of new technologies developed in the areas of computers and communications that
were made available and accessible to the user.
The telecommunications industry has seen a rapid boost within the last decade. New realities
and visions of functionalities in various telecommunications networks have brought forward the
concept of next-generation networks (NGNs). The competitions among operators for support-
ing various services, lowering of the cost of having mobile and cellular phones and smartphones,
increasing demand for general mobility, explosion of digital traffic, and advent of convergence
network technologies added more dynamism in the IDEA of NGNs. In fact, facilitating con-
vergence of networks and convergence of various types of services is a significant objective of
NGNs.
Until the mid-1990s most readers would probably not have even come across the term soft-
ware defined radio (SDR), let alone had an IDEA what it referred to. Since then SDR has made
the transition from obscurity to mainstream, albeit still with many different understandings of
the terms – software radio, software defined radio, software based radio, reconfigurable radio.
The IDEA for this book was born during one of my project-related trips to the beautiful city
of Hangzhou in China, where in the role of Chief Architect I had to guide a team of very
young, very smart and extremely dedicated software developers and verification engineers.
Soon it became clear that as eager as the team was to jump into the coding, it did not have
any experience in system architecture and design and if I did not want to spend all my time in
constant travel between San Francisco and Hangzhou, the only option was to groom a number
of local junior architects. Logically, one of the first questions being asked by these carefully
selected future architects was whether I could recommend a book or other learning material
that could speed up the learning cycle. I could not. Of course, there were many books on
various related topics, but many of them were too old and most of the updated information
was either somewhere on the Internet dispersed between many sites and online magazines, or
buried in my brain along with many years of experience of system architecture.
The ability to analyze system or circuit behavior is one of the key requirements for
successful design. To put an IDEA to work, a designer needs both the knowledge
and tools for analyzing the behavior of that new system architecture or that experi-
mental circuit topology. Design decisions are grounded on the results obtained from
analysis.
