The future evolution of wireless mobile communications

At the start of the 21st century, wireless mobile communications has witnessed an unprecedented growth fueled by information explosion and technology revolution. After much fierce technology competitions and uncertainties, two third-generation (3G) wideband standards have emerged to dominate the wireless mobile communications for years to come. They are the CDMA2000 [1] and the universal mobile terrestrial system (UMTS) [2] standards, both of which are based on code-division multiple-access (CDMA) technology. In this paper, we shall indicate how current 2G digital wireless systems might evolve into these 3G systems. We shall examine the likely innovative techniques to be adopted for further evolution of the two systems and the possible capacity gains obtainable by utilizing these techniques. Copyright (C) 2003 John Wiley Sons, Ltd.