Wireless Communications

Preface

This book is intended for graduate students and senior undergraduates majoring in wireless communications, but can be also used as a reference book for practicing engineers. Human society is now in an information era, and knowledge has been explosively accumulating, especially in the last three decades. It is, therefore, impossible to embody all new developments in a single textbook. In selecting the contents of this book, we have tried to cover the most representative achievements since C.E. Shannon established his revolutionary foundation for information theory in 1948, with emphasis on the thoughts, philosophy, and methodology behind them. Indeed, the existing knowledge is undoubtedly important. It is the thoughts and methodology that help create new knowledge for the future.

The transportation of information requires energy and channel resources, the latter of which can be further subdivided into frequency resource and spatial resource. The purpose of wireless communications is to fully exploit these resources to implement satisfactory transmission of information over a wireless channel with a desired data rate and a reasonable transceiver complexity. The satisfaction is usually measured in terms of three metrics: reliability, spectral efficiency, and system complexity. The impedance to reliable and spectrally efficient transmission stems from the impairments of a physical channel, which may include additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN), interference, and multipath ...