Radio communications: components, systems and networks

Dear readers: As one of us was flying over the Pacific returning from a trip to Asia, this editor recalled a comment from Bob Lucky's speech at the 1992 Conference on Information Sciences and Systems in Princeton - "If I were to start my career again, I would work in wireless communications."Indeed, recent decades in wireless communications have brought nothing less than an explosion in all areas of research and development, followed by a proliferation of devices (we are often reminded that they are not simply phones) that have changed our everyday lives. In any of our disciplines, from physical layer design to networking, we have witnessed how advanced concepts from research laboratories find their way into products in record time - multiuser detectors, multiple input multiple output (MIMO), and turbo decoders to name a few. It is not clear whether our schools can teach graduates fast enough to keep up with the rate of adoption of advanced technologies in the markets. The adoption of wireless technologies such as cellular, WiFi, GPS, and Bluetooth, as well as more recent developments such as WiMAX and near field communications, are transforming the way we interact, communicate, and socialize.