Overview

It is fitting to begin a book about wireless communication with a look at the phenomena that lets us transfer information from one point to another without any physical medium the propagation of radio waves. If you want to design an efficient radio communication system, even for operation over relatively short distances, you should understand the behavior of the wireless channel in the various surroundings where this communication is to take place. While the use of brute force increasing transmission power could overcome inordinate path losses, limitations imposed on design by required battery life, or by regulatory authorities, make it imperative to develop and deploy short-range radio systems using solutions that a knowledge of radio propagation can give.

The overall behavior of radio waves is described by Maxwell s equations. In 1873, the British physicist James Clerk Maxwell published his Treatise on Electricity and Magnetism in which he presented a set of equations that describe the nature of electromagnetic fields in terms of space and time. Heinrich Rudolph Hertz performed experiments to confirm Maxwell s theory, which led to the development of wireless telegraph and radio. Maxwell s equations form the basis for describing the propagation of radio waves in space, as well as the nature of varying electric and magnetic fields in conducting and insulating materials, and the flow of waves in waveguides. From them, you can derive the skin effect equation and the electric and magnetic field relationships very close to antennas of all kinds. A number of...