Fundamentals of WiMAX was consciously written to appeal to a broad audience, and to be of
value to anyone who is interested in the IEEE 802.16e standards or wireless broadband networks
more generally. The book contains cutting-edge tutorials on the technical and theoretical under-
pinnings to WiMAX that are not available anywhere else, while also providing high-level over-
views that will be informative to the casual reader.
This book describes how global mobile communication was made. It is written for those who
want or need to know how this was achieved e.g.:
? Young professionals who want to build their career on GSM and UMTS and need to
understand the basics
? Strategic and technical planners who want to drive the future GSM and UMTS develop-
ment
? Strategists who plan to repeat GSM’s success in the fourth generation
? Academics, who want to understand and analyse the development of GSM and UMTS;
? Activists in other large scale international communication projects who want to use
experiences gained
This book was conceived in such a special way. From our experience, and despite the
increasing interest that we perceived amongst the research community in HAPS,
there was not any book in the market entirely devoted to HAPS. We could only find
some satellite communications books including only fragments related to HAPS,
covering the ‘generalities’. A need for a reference book which could highlight state-
of-the-art HAPS-related topics was therefore envisaged. Moreover, most of the
information related to HAPS could only be found in technical reports, official
recommendations, conference proceedings and journal papers.
Our original effort in writing this book was to create a starting point for those in
the business community who did not have a high level of technical expertise but
needed to have some understanding of the technical functions of their information
and communication technologies (ICT) in a corporate environment. As was true
with the first edition of this book, if you are already an engineer, find some other
form of pleasure reading—this text is not designed for you!
The genesis for this book was my involvement with the development of the
SystemView (now SystemVue) simulation program at Elanix, Inc. Over several
years of development, technical support, and seminars, several issues kept recur-
ring. One common question was, “How do you simulate (such and such)?” The sec-
ond set of issues was based on modern communication systems, and why particular
developers did what they did. This book is an attempt to gather these issues into a
single comprehensive source.
In the nineteenth century, scientists, mathematician, engineers and innovators started
investigating electromagnetism. The theory that underpins wireless communications was
formed by Maxwell. Early demonstrations took place by Hertz, Tesla and others. Marconi
demonstrated the first wireless transmission. Since then, the range of applications has
expanded at an immense rate, together with the underpinning technology. The rate of
development has been incredible and today the level of technical and commercial maturity
is very high. This success would not have been possible without understanding radio-
wave propagation. This knowledge enables us to design successful systems and networks,
together with waveforms, antennal and transceiver architectures. The radio channel is the
cornerstone to the operation of any wireless system.
With this book at your fingertips, you, the reader, and I have something in common. We share
the same interest in mobile radio channels. This area attracted my interest first in autumn 1992
whenImovedfromindustrytoacademiatofindachallengeinmylifeandtopursueascientific
career. Since then, I consider myself as a student of the mobile radio channel who lives for
modelling, analyzing, and simulating them. While the first edition of this book resulted from
my teaching and research activities at the technical University of Hamburg-Harburg (TUHH),
Germany, the present second edition is entirely an outcome of my work at the University of
Agder, Norway.
Multi-carrier modulation? Orthogonal Frequency Division Multi-
plexing (OFDM) particularly? has been successfully applied to
a wide variety of digital communications applications over the past
several years. Although OFDM has been chosen as the physical layer
standard for a diversity of important systems? the theory? algorithms?
and implementation techniques remain subjects of current interest.
This is clear from the high volume of papers appearing in technical
journals and conferences.
The fi rst edition of this book came about because Regina Lundgren had always been
fascinated with communication. She started writing novels in the third grade. When she
was asked on her fi rst day at the University of Washington what she hoped to do with her
degree in scientifi c and technical communication, she replied, “I want to write environ-
mental impact statements.” When Patricia Clark hired her to work at the Pacifi c Northwest
National Laboratory to do just that, she was overjoyed.
The outcome of the 3GPP SAE (system architecture evolution) technical study
and specification work is a set of standards that specifies the evolution of the
packet core network for GSM/GPRS and WCDMA/HSPA to an all-IP architec-
ture and enables a feature-rich ‘common packet core’ for radio accesses devel-
oped within 3GPP and also by other standardization fora.
