Duringthe past years, there has been a quickly rising interest in radio access technologies for providing
mobile as well as nomadic and fixed services for voice, video, and data. This proves that the difference
in design, implementation, and use between telecom and datacom technologies is also becoming more
blurred. What used to be a mobile phone used for voice communication is today increasingly
becoming the main data communication device for end-users, providing web browsing, SOCIAL
networking, and many other services.
Cooperation has been the subject of intensive study in the SOCIAL and biological
sciences, as well as in mathematics and artificial intelligence. The fundamental
finding is that even egoists can sustain cooperation provided the structure of
their environment allows for repeated interactions (Axelrod 1984).
Designing for Networked Communications: Strategies and Development is a book
about how we plan, use, and understand the products, dynamic SOCIAL processes,
and tasks upon which depend some of the most vital innovations in the knowledge
society—SOCIAL as well as technological ones. Focusing on various forms of design,
implementation, and integration of computer-mediated communication (CMC), the
book bridges the academic fields of computer science and communication stud-
ies.
The information technology (IT) revolution is surely coming in this century, just
as did the agricultural and industrial revolutions that have already so enriched our
lives. As the IT revolution progresses, it is expected that almost all SOCIAL struc-
tures and economic activities will be changed substantially
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.
Do you have a mobile phone? We think you probably do, one way or another. We
would also guess that you might use it for many diff erent things in the course of your
everyday life—as a telephone certainly, but also as an address book, as a clock or
watch, as a camera, or now as a connection to your computer, email and the internet.
Th ere will be a range of people you use it to contact (or not), and various strategies
you use to take calls—or send texts, or take photos, or receive emails, or search online
(or not, in diff erent situations). Th ere are also likely to be a range of SOCIAL relation-
ships in your life that your mobile phone helps to maintain—or disrupts, or inter-
venes in, or makes possible, or complicates, or just plain helps to handle.
Communication has been one of the deepest needs of the human race throughout recorded
history. It is essential to forming SOCIAL unions, to educating the young, and to expressing a
myriad of emotions and needs. Good communication is central to a civilized society.
The various communication disciplines in engineering have the purpose of providing technological
aids to human communication. One could view the smoke signals and drum rolls of primitive
societies as being technological aids to communication, but communication technology as we
view it today became important with telegraphy, then telephony, then video, then computer
communication, and today the amazing mixture of all of these in inexpensive, small portable
devices.
Mobile operators must continuously pursue cost‐
effective and efficient solutions to meet the high data
demand requirements of their subscribers. Limited spectrum
allocations and non‐contiguous spectrum blocks continue
to pose challenges for mobile operators supporting large
data uploads and downloads across their networks. With the
increase in video and SOCIAL media content, the challenges
have increased exponentially.
Mobile and wireless communication systems are a prominent communications
technology of the twenty-first century with profound economic and SOCIAL impacts
in practically all parts of the world. The current state of wireless communication
systems allows for a much wider scope of applications than what it used to be
originally, that is, to be a mobile extension of the public switched telephone
network.
Short-range communications is one of the most relevant as well as diversified fields of en-
deavour in wireless communications. As such, it has been a subject of intense research and
development worldwide, particularly in the last decade. There is no reason to believe that this
trend will decline. On the contrary, the rapidly crystallizing vision of a hyper-connected world
will certainly strengthen the role of short-range communications in the future. Concepts such
as wireless SOCIAL networks, Internet of things, car communications, home and office network-
ing, wireless grids and personal communications heavily rely on short-range communications
technology.
