Book Description

Mobile and wireless communications applications have a clear impact on improving the humanity wellbeing. From cell phones to wireless internet to home and office devices, most of the applications are converted from wired into wireless communication. Smart and advanced wireless communication environments represent the future technology and evolutionary development step in homes, hospitals, industrial, vehicular and transportation systems. A very appealing research area in these environments has been the wireless ad hoc, sensor and mesh networks. These networks rely on ultra low powered processing nodes that sense surrounding environment temperature, pressure, humidity, motion or chemical hazards, etc. Moreover, the radio frequency (RF) transceiver nodes of such networks require the design of transmitter and receiver equipped with high performance building blocks including antennas, power and low noise amplifiers, mixers and voltage controlled oscillators. Nowadays, the researchers are facing several challenges to design such building blocks while complying with ultra low power consumption, small area and high performance constraints. CMOS technology represents an excellent candidate to facilitate the integration of the whole transceiver on a single chip. However, several challenges have to be tackled while designing and using nanoscale CMOS technologies and require innovative idea from researchers and circuits designers. While major researchers and applications have been focusing on RF wireless communication, optical wireless communication based system has started to draw some attention from researchers for a terrestrial system as well as for aerial and satellite terminals. This renewed interested in optical wireless communications is driven by several advantages such as no licensing requirements policy, no RF radiation hazards, and no need to dig up roads besides its large bandwidth and low power consumption. This second part of the book, Mobile and Wireless Communications: Key Technologies and Future Applications, covers the recent development in ad hoc and sensor networks, the implementation of state of the art of wireless transceivers building blocks and recent development on optical wireless communication systems. We hope that this book will be useful for students, researchers and practitioners in their research studies.