Applications and Requirements of Wireless Services

This chapter provides an overview of the different services and applications of wireless communications, and their impact on technical requirements. It starts out with a brief history of the development of wireless communications, from the first public radio and TV broadcasting, to satellite communications, to the great boom of cellular voice communications in the 1990s, to the current focus on mobile data transmission and sensor networks. Next, we discuss the characteristics of the main types of services: broadcast, paging, cellular telephony, trunking radio, cordless telephony, wireless local area networks and personal area networks, fixed wireless access, ad-hoc networks and sensor networks, and satellite communications. For each of those categories we describe the requirements for data rate, range and number of users, whether communication is unidirectional or bi-directional, ability to handle mobility, energy consumption, use of spectrum, and quality of service. A discussion of the economic and social aspects of wireless communications concludes the chapter.