TABLE OF CONTENTS This chapter contains a discussion on the evolution of mobile and wireless communications, as well as a brief description of the contents of the book. For the former, a perspective on the evolution of mobile and wireless communications is given. The latter intends to present the scope of the book, its structure, and the way the various chapters are related to each other.
Mobile and wireless coommunications have known a success that is beyond the most optimistic intial expectations. In some countries, namely European ones, the penetration of mobile communications is around 100%, which means that virtually everyone capable of using a mobile phone has (at least) one. How did we get here? What were the reasons for this huge success? These questions have been discussed over and over, and are not addressed here. Nevertheless, one thing is certain: in the past, someone, somewhere, had a vision that we all could use a single communications device under the well-known motto anytime, anywhere .
In the first years of the 1980s, Europe was at the very beginning of the commercial exploration of mobile communications services (exclusively voice at the time), almost each country presenting its own system (the so-called 1st Generation (1G)). Things taken for granted nowadays, like roaming, were not possible, in most cases not even between countries using the same system. The panorama was very much different from the one we live in today.
Then, as a consequence of the previously mentioned...
