The roadmap to broadband wireless communications - from kbps to Gbps

Summary form only given. The success of wireless communications for voice applications is evidenced by the sale of 400 million GSM cellular telephones every year world-wide. Wireless telephony has changed the way we live, work, and play. The emergence of the Internet in the last decade changed the way we share information with each other, be it via e-mail or through Web browsing. Today, all forms of information are available in digital formats, such as digital speech, digital audio, digital images, digital video, and of course digital text. The next revolution in our lives will be access to broadband digital content - anytime and anywhere. The underlying technology enabling this revolution would be seamless, ubiquitous broadband wireless communications. We present the fundamental mechanisms available to increase the data rate of wireless communication systems. These include bandwidth, constellation order, and multiple antennas. We step through the history of wireless communication systems (such as AMPS, IS-136/GSM, IS-95, IEEE 802.11, IEEE 802.15, IEEE 802.16), and show how the various standards have steadily pushed the broadband frontier. We highlight the practical limitations associated with the various signaling techniques (such as TDMA, CDMA, OFDM etc.), and discuss tradeoffs for designing a wireless communication system operating at 1 gigabit per second.