Foreword

Two technologies that have profoundly impacted people on this planet recently are cellular telephony and the Internet. The former, with its tremendous advantages of tetherless and ubiquitous communication capabilities, was accepted worldwide. It met the expectations of a success story for wealthy nations. On the other hand, its reach into the developing and the not-so-prosperous parts of the world was even more profound. These parts of the world did not have the infrastructure for providing PSTN services for the vast majority of the population, for the obvious reason that tremendous investment was needed. At the end of the twentieth century, the demographics of the most populous nations of the world changed, with a tilt towards a large middle class population that could afford the luxury of a telephone in every household. This need was a big impetus for the growth of the cellular telephony worldwide.

The second most important technology with a global appeal is the Internet. Personal Computers (PCs), laptops, personal digital assistants, and even cellular phones can be connected to the Internet. The Internet has touched almost every segment of the population on the face of this planet with applications (besides worldwide email) in business, education, healthcare, and manufacturing, to name a few.

Cellular telephone networks could be either circuit switched or packet switched. The former could be viewed as wireless versions of the traditional PSTN with voice telephony being the primary application. The latter are wireless extensions to the Internet and hence are suitable for mobile data networking. Such cellular networks adopt the well-known Internet Protocol (IP) for networking and can be exploited for providing mobile multimedia services.

This book, IP-Based Next-Generation Wireless Networks, by Jyh-Cheng Chen and Tao Zhang, deals with wireless IP networking architectures, protocols, and techniques at the IP layer and above. It is a valuable reference for academicians, engineers, and business personnel. It comes at an appropriate time.

Prathima Agrawal, Ph.D.

Assistant Vice President, Network Systems Research Laboratory, and
Executive Director, Mobile Networking Research Department
Telcordia Technologies
Email: pagrawal@research.telcordia.com
August 2003