Product Description

For cellular radio engineers and technicians. The leading book on wireless communications offers a wealth of practical information on the implementation realities of wireless communications. This book also contains up-to-date information on the major wireless communications standards from around the world. Covers every fundamental aspect of wireless communications, from cellular system design to networking, plus world-wide standards, including ETACS, GSM, and PDC. Theodore Rappaport is Series Editor for the Prentice Hall Communication, Engineering, and Emerging Technologies Series.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #53523 in Books
• Published on: 2002-01-10
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 736 pages

Customer Reviews

Caveat Emptor
As a lecturer in Mobile Telecommunications I was concerned that this book is light on detail in some places, and authoritatively wrong in others. For example, the author makes basic errors in his description of the GSM logical architecture (particularly with respect to the network databases) and he does not describe the current HR and EFR GSM voice codecs; the section on IS-95 CDMA does not describe soft handoff or cell identification in detail and has not been updated to describe IS-95A. His derivation of Erlang B is also missing a number of key steps. These factors make this textbook unrecommendable for my students. A THOROUGH revision is in order for the next edition.

Pretty light
If I had not seen the Gorden Stuber book I would have given this book only 1 star. However in comparison, it does deserve at least 2.

This book has all the stuff you would want in a wireless text book. It covers fading, Rayleigh, Rician, GSM, AMPS etc. My major complaint with the book is THERE ARE NO EXAMPLES. Per chapter there are probably 3 or 4 examples, but none of them are really challenging.

For instance in the fading chapter, the examples are on coherence time only. How about a couple examples that actually use the fading PDF's/CDF's. We spend so much time "discussing" the distributions, maybe it is time we actually use the distributions?

Compared to "Principles of Mobile Communication" the book is marginally better. For one it is not as heavy on the math, and it does a better job explaining pretty well everything.

However.. I feel I learned far more from Shankar's wireless book in undergrad.

A very technical book
I recommend this book for anyone pursuing a Certification like CWNA, CWNP or other wireless certifications. The technical concepts which are at the core of design, implementation, research, and invention of wireless communication systems are presented in an order that is conducive to understanding the general concepts, as well as those specific to current and evolving wireless communication systems and standards.
The Author has done a great job of explaining Radio wave propagation which has historically been the most difficult problem to analyze and design for, since unlike a wired communication system which has a constant, stationary transmission channel (i.e., a wired path), radio channels are random and undergo shadowing and multipath fading, particularly when one of the terminals is in motion. I particularly liked the chapter on modeling spatial-temporal channels, which is vital for the development of smart antennas and position location systems.
The appendices contain hundreds of mathematical formulas and identities for general engineering work.
The compilation of the major wireless standards makes this book particularly useful as a single source of information for a wide range of wireless systems that are commercially deployed today.
I gave this book 4 stars as I feel that the problems included in the book should have the answers as well.
Niloufer Tamboly, CISSP