An understanding of the policies, regulations, standards and techniques of radio spectrum
management is useful to those who manage and administrate it, to operators, to equipment
providers and to the users of wireless communication (i.e., all of us). For many Years the author
has been deeply involved in ruling the RF spectrum at the national, regional and global levels.
The book is based on the professional experience of the author, his academic courses, presenta-
tions and tutorials in five continents. The book reflects this legacy and will be of use to engineers,
lawyers and economists, who serve the global industry of the wireless world; in it they may find
solutions to the problems they frequently encounter.
Digital mobile wireless communication and the Internet have undergone a
fantastic growth in the last few Years and, despite originating from two different
worlds, they are converging. This convergence corresponds to the evolution of
mobile systems towards the highest broadband data transmissions (GSM,
EDGE/GPRS, UMTS then HSDPA), while the computing world gets equipped with
wireless technologies such as Wi-Fi or Wi-Max.
The first gem of wisdom I ever acquired about consulting, obtained many Years ago
from a former schoolmate, was to ensure that everything is plugged in: no continuity, no
data. Wires carry voltages and currents from one place to another. Their behavior is
reasonably simple and predictable—at least for sufficiently low data rates and short
lengths—and they can be seen, grabbed, traced, and tugged.
The unguided transmission of information using electromagnetic waves
at radio frequency (RF) is often referred to as wireless communications,
the first demonstration of which took place at the end of the 19th cen-
tury and is attributed to Hertz. The technology was, shortly thereafter,
commercialised by, amongst others, Marconi in one of the first wire-
less communication systems, i.e., wireless telegraphy. In the first half of
the 20th century the technology was developed further to enable more
than the mere transmission of Morse code. This first resulted in uni-
directional radio broadcasting and several Years later also in television
broadcasting.
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.
Over the past ten Years there has been a revolution in the devel-
opment and acceptance of mobile products. In that period, cel-
lular telephony and consumer electronics have moved from the
realm of science fiction to everyday reality. Much of that revolu-
tion is unremarkable – we use wireless, in its broadest sense, for
TV remote controls, car keyfobs, travel tickets and credit card
transactions every day.
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.
Driven by the desire to boost the quality of service of wireless systems closer to that afforded
by wireline systems, space-time processing for multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO)
wireless communications research has drawn remarkable interest in recent Years. Excit-
ing theoretical advances, complemented by rapid transition of research results to industry
products and services, have created a vibrant and growing area that is already established
by all counts. This offers a good opportunity to reflect on key developments in the area
during the past decade and also outline emerging trends.
Radio frequency spectrum is a scarce and critical natural resource that is utilized for
many services including surveillance, navigation, communication, and broadcast-
ing. Recent Years have seen tremendous growth in the use of spectrum especially by
commercial cellular operators. Ubiquitous use of smartphones and tablets is one
of the reasons behind an all-time high utilization of spectrum. As a result, cellular
operators are experiencing a shortage of radio spectrum to meet bandwidth
demands of users. On the other hand, spectrum measurements have shown that
much spectrum not held by cellular operators is underutilized even in dense urban
areas. This has motivated shared access to spectrum by secondary systems with no
or minimal impact on incumbent systems. Spectrum sharing is a promising
approach to solve the problem of spectrum congestion as it allows cellular operators
access to more spectrum in order to satisfy the ever-growing bandwidth demands of
commercial users.
The idea for this book was born during one of my project-related trips to the beautiful city
of Hangzhou in China, where in the role of Chief Architect I had to guide a team of very
young, very smart and extremely dedicated software developers and verification engineers.
Soon it became clear that as eager as the team was to jump into the coding, it did not have
any experience in system architecture and design and if I did not want to spend all my time in
constant travel between San Francisco and Hangzhou, the only option was to groom a number
of local junior architects. Logically, one of the first questions being asked by these carefully
selected future architects was whether I could recommend a book or other learning material
that could speed up the learning cycle. I could not. Of course, there were many books on
various related topics, but many of them were too old and most of the updated information
was either somewhere on the Internet dispersed between many sites and online magazines, or
buried in my brain along with many Years of experience of system architecture.
