WIRELESS DATA COMMUNICATIONS

Wireless data services and systems represent a rapidly growing and increasingly important segment of the communications industry. In this paper we present an overview of this field, emphasizing three major elements: 1) technologies utilized in existing and currently planned wireless data services, 2) issues related to the performance of these systems, and 3) discernible trends in the continuing development of wireless data systems. While the wireless data industry is becoming increasingly diverse and fragmented, one can identify a few mainstreams which relate directly to users' requirement for data services. On one hand, there are requirements for relatively low-speed data services supporting mobile users over wide geographical areas, as provided by mobile data networks. On the other hand, there are requirements for high-speed data services in local areas, as provided by wireless LAN's. The system-level issues are somewhat different for these two categories of services, and this has led to different technology choices in the two domains, which we discuss in the paper.