IntroductiontoWirelessDigitalCommunication.epub

Preface I wrote this book to make the principles of wireless communication more accessible. Wireless communication is the dominant means of Internet access for most people, and it has become the means by which our devices connect to the Internet and to each other. Despite the ubiquity of wireless, the principles of wireless communication have remained out of reach for many engineers. The main reason seems to be that the technical concepts of wireless communication are built on the foundations of digital communication. Unfortunately, digital communication is normally studied at the end of an undergraduate program in electrical engineering, leaving no room for a course on wireless communication. In addition, this puts wireless communication out of reach for students in related areas like computer science or aerospace engineering, where digital communication may not be offered. This book provides a means to learn wireless communication together with the fundamentals of digital communication. The premise of this book is that wireless communication can be learned with only a background in digital signal processing (DSP). The utility of a DSP approach stems from the following fact: wireless communication signals (at least ideally) are bandlimited. Thanks to Nyquist’s theorem, it is possible to represent bandlimited continuous-time signals from their samples in discrete time. As a result, discrete time can be used to represent the continuous-time transmitted and received signals in a wireless system. With this connection, channel impairments like multipath fading and noise can be written in terms of their discrete-time equivalents, creating a model for the received signal that is entirely in discrete time.