Introduction to Mobile Broadband Wireless

The development of mobile communications has traditionally been viewed as a sequence of successive generations. The first generation of analogue mobile telephony was followed by the second, digital, generation. Then, the third generation was envisaged to enable full multimedia data transmission as well as voice communications. In parallel to these activities related to the evolution of current wireless technologies, there is also an increased research effort on future radio access, referred to as fourth-generation (4G) radio access. Such future radio access is anticipated to take the performance and service provisioning of wireless systems a step further, providing data rates up to 100 Mbps with wide-area coverage and up to 1 Gbps with local-area coverage.