Alister Burr
Modulation and Coding for Wireless Communications
Pearson Education Limited, Harlow England, 2001
Hardcover, pp-360, plus XX, \$ 50,99
ISBN 0-201-39857-5
http://www.pearsoneduc.com

In general about book

Wireless communications as the fastest growing segment of the communications industry has experienced a tremendous growth spurt in the past decade. Cellular phones, cordless phones, paging services and mobile Internet services has become standard business tools and inseparable part of our everyday life. The main topic of this book is devoted to explanation of the basic principles of modulation and coding in wireless communications. Modulation is an activity of encoding an information signal into the amplitude, phase, or frequency of the transmitted signal, while the coding is a step of adding redundant bits to the transmitted bit stream, which are used by the receiver to correct errors introduced by the channel. The book is divided into eleven chapters, two appendices and Index.

Chapter content

Chapter 1, firstly, introduces the basic concepts of modulation and coding, after that considers the parameters by which the performance of modulation and coding scheme can be assessed, point to bandwidth and power requirements as more important parameters, identifies more advanced forms of modulation and coding, and finally gives an outline of the remainder of the book. Chapter 2 through Chapter 4 concentrate on an explanation of modulation schemes and modem design. Chapter 2 describes the most important linear modulation shemes such as binary phase-shift keying (BPSK), quadrature phase-shift keying (QPSK), multiphase PSK (M-PSK) and quadrature amplitude modulation (QAM) are analyzed. Chapter 3 deals with modulation for non-linear systems. It describes some classes of non-linear, or exponential, modulation schemes, such as the general class of frequency-shift keying (FSK) and its important special case of minimal-shift keying (MSK), and the class of continuous phase modulation (CPM) and its important representative Gaussian minimum-shift keying (GMSK). Chapter 4 covers the details of modem design. Once the modem architecture is defined the author turns to the more concrete aspects of the topic, beginning with modulators. Next it discusses coherent and non-coherent demodulators, and finally concludes with synchronization problem. Chapter 5 through Chapter 7 deal with principles of coding and properties of codes. Basic principles of forward-error-correction (FEC) coding are explained in Chapter 5. The chapter also discusses the topics related to types of code, bound on the performance of a digital communication system, geometric representation of a signal and its code, hard and soft decision decoding , and performance of coded systems. Chapter 6 covers the features and implementation of block codes. It includes discussions of the most important cyclic block codes Bose-Chaudhuri-Hocquenghem (BCH) block codes. The second main type of error control code, the convolutional codes, are described in Chapter 7. It goes into details about the code presentation, decoding process, evaluating the BER performance of convolutional codes, and punctured codes. Chapter 8 discusses an important feature of communications technology called coded modulation, by which power improvement and bandwidth efficiency can be achieved simultaneously. The wireless radio channel is a difficult medium, susceptible to noise, interference, blockage, and multipath. Chapter 9 deals with one of the most severe radio-channel impairments-multipath propagation. It describes the effects of the multipath channel on digital radio systems, included coded modulation systems, and introduces a number of countermeasures against these effects. The last two chapters (Chapters 10 and Chapter 11) offer a good introduction to two areas that recently attracted a great deal of attention, orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) and turbo codes, respectively.

Two appendices are included to support the material in the text:
Appendix 1 deals with the theory of finite, or Galois fields,
Appendix 2 describes the principle of MAP algorithm.

Useful book

The organization of individual chapter is almost identical. It begins with objectives that present the concepts covered, after that follows the central parts where the main topics are discussed and concludes with unsolved problems (excepting Chapter 10 and Chapter 11), and References. In summary, the book is authored by practicing expert in the field of wireless communications. It is nicely written and will be useful to those readers who are interested in acquiring a strong background in modulation and coding primarily regarded as a single, rather than two separate processes. In other words, the book is recommended to final year undergraduate students or Master's level postgraduate students, and can also serves as a reference for professional communication engineers in the field of wireless communications. Having in mind all mentioned above, I would like to recommend this book.