Recent advances in cellular wireless communications

Testimonies of "wireless catching up with wireline" have begun. An information superhighway system is envisioned to fulfill the plethora of demand for wireless communications and the need for multimedia networks with multiservice requirements. The revolution in this technology will eventually free us, as communication users, from being tied down to a particular fixed location in a telephone network to person-to-person communications, via pocket-sized terminals, at an affordable price. This article briefly surveys the state of the art, standards, and technological growth experienced in mobile cellular (terrestrial and satellite) communications since the days of the ingenious inventions of Alexander Graham Bell and Guglielmo Marconi, over a century ago. Subsequently, we describe some emerging technological trends that can improve the capacity of third-generation systems and future outlooks for PCS networks in the next millennium.