Page 13 - From GMS to LTE

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Preface

Wireless technologies like GSM, UMTS, LTE, Wireless LAN and Bluetooth have
revolutionized the way we communicate by making services like telephony and Internet
access available anytime and from almost anywhere. Today, a great variety of technical
publications offer background information about these technologies but they all fall
short in one way or another. Books covering these technologies usually describe only
one of the systems in detail and are generally too complex as a first introduction. The
Internet is also a good source, but the articles one finds are usually too short and super-
ficial or only deal with a specific mechanism of one of the systems. For this reason, it
was difficult for me to recommend a single publication to students in my telecommunication
classes, which I have been teaching in addition to my work in the wireless telecommunication
industry. This book aims to change this.
Each of the seven chapters in this book gives a detailed introduction to and overview
of one of the wireless systems mentioned above and how it has been deployed in practice.
Special emphasis has also been put on explaining the thoughts and reasoning behind
the development of each system. For readers who want to test their understanding of a
system, each chapter concludes with a list of questions. For further investigation, all
chapters contain references to the relevant standards and other documents. These provide
ideal additional sources to find out more about a specific system or topic. In addition a
companion website with further background information and the latest news is available
at https://www.wirelessmoves.com.
Since the previous edition of the book was published in 2014, mobile networks have
again evolved significantly. As this book focuses on being a guide to how network tech-
nology is being used in the field today, the current edition has been significantly updated.
Most innovations in recent years have focused on Long‐Term Evolution (LTE). As a
consequence, the chapter on LTE was extensively enhanced and extended. Major new
and updated topics include a description of the different implementations of LTE
Carrier Aggregation (CA) in today’s networks, mobility management, cell reselection
and handover procedures in practice, additional information on the TD‐LTE air inter-
face, IPv6 in mobile networks, Network Function Virtualization (NFV) and Narrow‐
Band Internet of Things (NB‐IoT). At the end of the chapter an introduction is given to
the current development status of 5G radio and core networks in 3GPP.
After many years, Voice over LTE (VoLTE) has finally become a reality in practice and
hence this topic was significantly extended and has been moved to a separate chapter.
Additional information has been added on the VoLTE call establishment process,
dedicated bearer setup, header compression, speech codec and bandwidth negotiation,