This book provides a tutorial introduction to digital mobile wireless networks. The field is so vast, and changing so rapidly, that no one book could cover the field in all its aspects. This book should, however, provide a solid foundation from which an interested reader can move on to topics not covered, or to more detailed discussions of subjects described here. Much more information is available in the references appended throughout the book, and the reader is urged to consult these when necessary. There is a host of journals covering current work in the field, many of them referenced in this book, which will provide the reader with up-to-date research results or tutorial overviews of the latest developments.

Note the use of the word digital in the first line above. The earliest wireless networks used analog communication, as we shall see in the historical section following. We shall provide a brief description of one of these analog networks, AMPS, that is currently still deployed, later in that section. But the stress in this book is on modern digital wireless networks. There are, basically, two types of digital wireless networks currently in operation worldwide. One type is the class of cellular networks, carrying voice calls principally, but increasingly carrying data and multimedia traffic as well, as more cell phones or other cell-based mobile terminals become available for these applications.