1 Overview of Communications Networks

Information networking has emerged as a multidisciplinary diversified area of research over the past few decades. From traditional wired telephony to cellular voice telephony and from wired access to wireless access to the Internet, information networks have profoundly impacted our lifestyles as they have undergone enormous growth. To understand this technology, students need to learn several disciplines and develop an intuitive feeling of how they interact with one another. To achieve this goal, the book describes important networking standards, classifying their underlying technologies in a logical manner and gives detailed examples of successful applications. The emergence of wireless access and dominance of the Ethernet in LAN technologies has shifted the innovations in networking towards the physical layer and characteristics of the medium. This book pays attention to the physical layer while we provide fundamentals of information networking technologies which are used in wired and wireless networks designed for local and wide area operations. The book provides a comprehensive treatment of the wired IEEE802.3 Ethernet, and Internet as well as ITU cellular 2G-6G wireless networks, IEEE 802.11 for Wi-Fi, and IEEE 802.15 for Bluetooth, ZigBee and ultra-wideband (UWB) technologies. The novelty of the book is that it places emphasis on physical communications issues related to formation and transmission of packets and characteristics of the medium for transmission in variety of networks. Material presented in the book will be beneficial for students of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Computer Science, Robotics Engineering, Biomedical Engineering, or other disciplines who are interested in integration of navigation into their multi-disciplinary projects. The book provides examples with supporting MATLAB codes and hands-on projects throughout to improve the ability of the readers to understand and implement variety of algorithms.