Design methods for mobile communications network dimensioning under realistic propagation conditions [Book Review]

One of the geographically largest and also most successful systems in business sense ever created by man must be the continuously upgrading and expanding mobile communications machine which, despite its apparent small variations, differences in developmental status, and national exceptions can still be regarded as one homogenous set of infrastructure, services, and users. The configuration and construction of a new network for flexible telephone or multimedia functions available on the road is certainly a task for advanced systems engineering when we just think of the numerous compromises involved and their impact on the cost, quality, and technical features. Shall we have a tower 30 feet higher than initially planned? (which creates additional problems with wind loading), or Can we install some directive antennas? (leaving out areas of lesser business weight but getting customer complaints), or Are we able to make use of the existing fibre? or Where can we find enough power to cool the main computer of the Mobile Switching Centre? and, Can our network tolerate a temporary increase of crazy subscribers during the football final, or could we link part of that trafJic to our partner’s network? Particularly within the built-up and congested urban areas even civil engineering is engaged in the matter because of the rather cruel and harsh game of getting base station sites at reasonable prices and near optimal locations. As we have seen (and most obviously, heard), some enterprises have succeeded well whereas others need to try still harder. Perhaps partly based on the introduction of so-called digital mobile networks those cellular systems in which voice is first converted into bits and bytes before sending them to the air interface (and in which a recovery of these tiny bits very often fails yieldingphonetical chicken feet) and even more recently because of the flourishing expansion of add-on services like paying bills, or ordering some products through the mobile phone, the designing of these networks seems to skip the most critical part: The radio wave propagation between the base station and the user terminal (cell phone, as we know it). Another reason for this must be the rather sad fact that few talented young university students have the needed motivation to dig deep into radio frequency engineering, which has created a serious human shortage. There simply are not enough people to tackle the design effort. This is just the academic area into which the book at hand, Design Methods for Mobile Communications by Norbert Geng and Werner Wiesbeck, puts its focus. The two scientists from the German University of Karlsruhe have assembled their tutorial material from currently running courses under a similar title, edited it considerably, and have persuaded Springer-Verlag to publish it in the form of a hard cover book all this in order to have a solid and comprehensive source of information for university students of electronics and communications technology which would encourage them to gain understanding in the fundamentals of radio systems. Some of us may know the worn-out joke about “A Small Pocket Book of Electronics” written obviously in Germany during the late 1950s. That book had about 1200 pages and covered as far as I understood as a young student everything imaginable. Despite its lay-out was postcard size, it would not fit into any available pocket and its weight must have exceeded two pounds. Well, this time we may relax. Dr. Geng and Professor Wiesbeck have gathered a reasonable 300-page volume which is divided into five main chapters a book which does not frustrate or frighten the reader on the first sight. The starting chapter is an introduction and is divided into three sub-sections. Both the various modern personal mobile communication systems are briefly highlighted, and then the typical tasks included in the network design process are looked at. The second main chapter discusses various theoretical models for the propagation environment starting from simple calculations with decibels, antenna factors and reflections at boundaries,“ and extends to different scattering cases and multipath scenarios. This chapter covers almost one half of the whole volume. Next, in chapter three, the unavoidable time-varying characteristics and frequency response issues of a propagation path are illustrated, particularly in the view of a moving user terminal. After the formal (or theoretical) treatment, chapter four has a relevant treatment of most common “official” wave propagation models, listed according to their “birth,” such as the empirical CCIR-model, ray-tracing models and models based on electromagnetic field theory. A