Third generation networks have been specified and are being deployed in certain countries. They are expected to reach maturity sometime during the first decade of the 21st century and to provide various services including audio, video, and world wide web browsing. Furthermore, radio terminals are expected to be integrated in a number of devices such as personal computers, personal digital assistants, and even television sets. Such a wide-usage of radio mandates ongoing research to address design of networks with high capacity while providing acceptable quality of service. Included in this text are results on the optimization of protocols in third generation systems. The radio channel is dynamically shared among several users using packet access, it must adapt to a varying number of users and accommodate various services. Several chapters deal with radio resource management and packet access both in second and third generation systems. The book also considers the performance of low layer protocols (MAC/RLC) and transport protocols when they are combined to offer data services.IPv6 will probably become an in-use network protocol and must be able to efficiently manage mobility and support multimedia flows. Wireless internet is an important area and related topics are included in this book. The improvement of the network performance relies on a sophisticated and optimized physical layer. The book includes studies on joint multiple access detection, MIMO systems, use of turbo-codes and methods to improve the analysis of the channel capacity. It also covers location management, handoff optimization, multi-hop networks and network management.
