During the past two decades there has been a substantial growth in research in
wireless communications. The number of journals Published from various parts of
the world catering to the research community has grown exponentially. Despite
such a growth, the engineering community still needs more information so as to
thoroughly comprehend wireless channel characteristics. What specifically must be
understood are the effects of channel degradation brought on by statistical fluctua-
tions in the channel.
One of the very first books Published on the social impact of the mobile phone
was Timo Kopomaa’s The City in Your Pocket: Birth of the Mobile Information Society.
The book, Published in 2000, was based on research that Kopomaa had under-
taken for Nokia and Sonera as part of his doctoral studies in the Centre for Urban
and Regional Studies at the Helsinki University of Technology. The first line he
writes in the book is peculiar: ‘Mobile communication is not a serious matter’. By
this, we assume he is referring to a view of the world that would regard the mobile
phone as little more than an unremarkable fact of everyday life – a simple play-
thing for the young, or a productivity tool for the business executive and busy
parent.
This book stems from its ancestor Digital Transmission Theory,Published by
Prentice-Hall in 1987 and now out of print. Following the suggestion of several colleagues who complained about the unavailability of a textbook they liked and adopted in their courses, laying a strong emphasis on wireless communication. We hope that those who liked the previous book will find again its flavor here,while new reader, untouched by nostalgia, will judge it favorably.
With the advent of IMT-2000, CDMA has emerged at the focal point of
interest in wireless communications. Now it has become impossible to discuss
wireless communications without knowing the CDMA technologies. There are
a number of books readily Published on the CDMA technologies, but they are
mostly dealing with the traditional spread-spectrum technologies and the IS-95
based CDMA systems. As a large number of novel and interesting technologies
have been newly developed throughout the IMT-2000 standardization process
in very recent years, new reference books are now demanding that address the
diverse spectrum of the new CDMA technologies.
Since the first edition of the book was Published, the field of modeling and simulation of
communication systems has grown and matured in many ways, and the use of simulation as a
day-to-day tool is now even more common practice. Many new modeling and simulation
approaches have been developed in the recent years, many more commercial simulation
packages are available, and the evolution of powerful general mathematical applications
packages has provided still more options for computer-aided design and analysis. With the
current interest in digital mobile communications, a primary area of application of modeling
and simulation is now to wireless systems of a different flavor than the traditional ones.
The first edition of this book was Published in 1992. Nine years later it had become
clear that a second edition was required because of the rapidly changing nature of
telecommunication. In 1992, the Internet was in existence but it was not the
household word that it is in the year 2001. Cellular telephones were also in use
but they had not yet achieved the popularity that they enjoy today. In the current
edition, Chapter 1 has been revised to include a section on the Internet. Chapter 10 is
new and it covers the facsimile machine; I had overlooked this important tele-
communication device in the first edition. Chapter 11 is also new and it describes the
pager, the cordless telephone and the cellular telephone system. These are examples
of a growing trend in telecommunications to go ‘‘wireless’’.
In the two years since this book was first Published, ultra wideband (UWB) has
advanced and consolidated as a technology, and many more people are aware of the
possibilities for this exciting technology. We too have expanded and consolidated
materials in this second edition in the hope that ‘Ultra Wideband: Signals and Systems
in Communication Engineering’ will continue to prove a useful tool for many students
and engineers to come to an understanding of the basic technologies for UWB.
In this book we focus on the basic signal processing that underlies current and
future ultra wideband systems. By looking at signal processing in this way we
hope this text will be useful even as UWB applications mature and change or
regulations regarding ultra wideband systems are modified. The current UWB
field is extremely dynamic, with new techniques and ideas being presented at every
communications and signal-processing conference. The basic signal-processing
techniques presented in this text though will not change for some time to come.
Thus, we have taken a somewhat theoretical approach, which we believe is longer
lasting and more useful to the reader in the long term than an up-to-the-minute
summary that is out of date as soon as it is Published.
Five years have passed since the first edition of this book was Published.Over the five years,the
world has witnessed a technological revolution headlined by an array of exciting consumer and
industrial products such as the Nintendo Wii, Apple iPod/iPad, sensor-rich smart phones,
phones with cameras,new operating systems for mobile phones and apps,e-books,WiFi,voice-
over-IP calls, social networking, 3D animated movies, and cloud computing, to name the major
ones that affect everyday living
The first edition as well as its forerunner of Kuffel and Abdullah Published in
1970 and their translations into Japanese and Chinese languages have enjoyed
wide international acceptance as basic textbooks in teaching senior under-
graduate and postgraduate courses in High-Voltage Engineering. Both texts
have also been extensively used by practising engineers engaged in the design
and operation of high-voltage equipment. Over the years the authors have
received numerous comments from the text’s users with helpful suggestions
for improvements. These have been incorporated in the present edition. Major
revisions and expansion of several chapters have been made to update the
continued progress and developments in high-voltage engineering over the
past two decades.
