The first edition of this book, published in 1995, was the first textbook to provide a
comprehensive introduction to the field of wireless information networks. That book
presented wireless networking as the enabling communications technology of the 1990s
and beyond. Now, only a decade later, mobile and portable telephones and wireless
data services are a familiar part of our daily lives, as the twenty-first century witnesses
widespread deployment of wireless networks, which has revolutionized the concept
of communication and information processing for business, professional, and private
applications. The field of wireless communications continues to experience unprecedented
market growth, as evidenced by over 1.5 billion cellular telephone subscribers
worldwide and the rapid increase in the size of the wireless local area network market
for office, home, and public access applications. The initial growth in the market
for second-generation cellular products and services spurred important new initiatives
toward the development and deployment of third-generation cellular networks. More
recently, attention has been focused on location-aware broadband ad hoc wireless
networks as the foundation for the next generation of wireless networking technology,
which is expected to enable systems of geographically dispersed sensors. The emerging
wireless sensor and ad hoc networks are expected to interconnect numerous terminals
with a variety of data-rate requirements with traditional multimedia Internet networks
to create a worldwide communication medium among RFID tags, a variety of sensors,
home appliances, and small robotic devices