8.1 Introduction

Accelerating demand for cellular telephony services and instantaneous access to network resources regardless of time constraints or subscriber location or mobility contributes to the wide array of cellular technologies, architectures, protocols, and solutions. Cellular networks enable increasingly affordable and customizable voice, data, and video transport via cellular phones. Cellular phones are also called mobile, wireless, portable, and/or compact handheld communicators, appliances, and/or devices. This chapter uses the aforementioned terms interchangeably.

In mobile communications networks, voice, video, and data are transported from source to destination through the air as electromagnetic signals, thus eliminating the need for wireline connections. Cellular solutions enable a diverse array of overlapping and complementary services and applications. As an example, D-AMPS (Digital-Advanced Mobile Phone Services) and PCS (Personal Communications Service) facilitate bi-directional or full-duplex short message exchange, voicemail, paging services, and access to wireless and/or wireline network connections via compact cellular communicators. These solutions also support frequency reuse, thereby enabling multiple subscribers within the same cell coverage area to use cellular telephony services concurrently. In addition, cellular communications implementations ideally facilitate global roaming, thereby enabling cellular subscribers to make and receive cellular phone calls at anytime and from everywhere.

8.2 Purpose

This chapter examines the distinguishing attributes and capabilities of cellular access systems, technologies, protocols, and architectures. The chapter also highlights standards groups and activities in the cellular communications domain; describes first-generation (1G), second-generation (2G), and third-generation (3G) cellular system initiatives; explores the capabilities of advanced mobile communications solutions that provision links to a diverse...