Reliability in Wireless Systems

Abstract

Cell phones represent a quite recent personal communication system, dating back only about 25 years. Initially the installation costs of the network infrastructures, the service, and the cellular phones, limited their use to commercial and professional customers and their service coverage to big cities in countries with major industrial development. A fast and growing technological development, together with an up-surge in customer demand, allowed both an increase in coverage and a reduction in service costs. These effects have further widened the total market opportunity for wireless devices. The introduction in 1993 of digital communications and of the GSM standard led off an overwhelming development of mobile communications; in addition to the first common commercial usage, a new consumer market started showing up; besides the principal voice services, new functions have begun to appear, such as the short messages service (SMS), introduced to solve providers’ service needs and now one of the principal income sectors for the mobile communication providers.