Radio Communications: Components, Systems, and Networks

Abstract

The articles in this special section focus on radio communications and technologies. From the nearly the dawn of radio technology, a pervasive theme has been the attempt to realize more bandwidth and capacity. The wide open spaces of 600- meter RF were soon crowded with interference, pushing communication links into shorter and shorter wavelengths and more creative channel utilization schemes. International regulatory bodies were quickly set up to deal with the situation and parcel out scarce spectrum among far too many requesters. Wireless spectrum usage has been the scene of constant change ever since, with primary, secondary, and tertiary users jockeying for access to every Hertz of RF channel. All this was mostly of interest to military and commercial interests — satellite operators, transportation companies, long-haul providers, and so on — until the 1990s, when cellular technology and, later, wireless LANs started taking off. The advent of widespread personal wireless communication meant that there was a lot more competition for spectrum from a lot more people, and heretofore “unattractive” blocks of spectrum suddenly became quite valuable real estate.