Fundamentals of Wireless Networks

This chapter briefly explains the basics of cellular networks, cell patterns and cell splitting. The cellular concept was initially proposed to help designers of land wireless systems to eliminate noise within the propagation channels and to minimize the effects of interference that occur in a multi‐user environment within band‐limited channels. These phenomena are mostly manifested for moving subscribers, that is, for mobile communication systems due to the Doppler Effect, which causes time‐dependent and frequency‐dependent fading effects. In contrast with the type of narrowband modulation, a different modulation technique, called spread spectrum (SS) modulation, produces a spectrum for the transmitted signal with data (bandpass signal) having much wider bandwidth than the usual bandwidth required to transfer desired information data stream through a wireless channel. There are four major access techniques to share the available bandwidth in the wireless communication networks. These are discusses in the chapter.