Preface

Wireless communications, together with its applications and underlying technologies, is among today's most active areas of technology development. The very rapid pace of improvements in both custom and programmable integrated circuits for signal processing applications has led to the justifiable view of advanced signal processing as a key enabler of the aggressively escalating capacity demands of emerging wireless systems. Consequently, there has been a tremendous and very widespread effort on the part of the research community to develop novel signal processing techniques that can fulfill this promise. The published literature in this area has grown explosively in recent years , and it has become quite difficult to synthesize the many developments described in this literature. The purpose of this book is to present, in one place and in a unified framework, a number of key recent contributions in this field. Even though these contributions come primarily from the research community, the focus of this presentation is on the development, analysis, and understanding of explicit algorithms for performing advanced processing tasks arising in receiver design for emerging wireless systems.

Although this book is largely self-contained, it is written principally for designers, researchers, and graduate students with some prior exposure to wireless communication systems. Knowledge of the field at the level of Theodore Rappaport's book, Wireless Communications: Principles and Practice [405], for example, would be quite useful to the reader of this book, as would some exposure to digital communications at the level of John Proakis's book, Digital Communications [396].