As wireless communications technologies evolve, Wideband Code Division Multiple Access (WCDMA) seems a strong candidate for providing multimedia to the handset, as well as Universal Mobile Telecommunications Services (UMTS) — which is to say common wireless communications standards over most of the world. WCDMA for UMTS sets out to decipher the standards documents of the Third Generation Partnership Project (3GPP). Specifically, this book deals with the 3GPP documents on Frequency Division Duplex (FDD) and Time Division Duplex (TDD) for Universal Terrestrial Radio Access (UTRA). This book should prove valuable to readers who plan to implement WCDMA in hardware designs or service offerings.
A series of engineering problems make up the backbone of the book, and each part of the deployment process is explained via text and calculations. For example, in the discussion on planning a radio network for WCDMA service provision, the book explains precisely how to take into account requirements (for quality of service, user capacity, and coverage) and conditions (such as terrain). Readers get formulas into which they can plug relative traffic predictions for voice, real-time data, non-real-time data, and overhead. There's also an explanation of how to interpret the formula output for deploying antennae. This is a serious engineering handbook for those who are involved in deploying WCDMA. — David Wall