Frequency spectrum is a limited and valuable resource for wireless
communications. A good example can be observed among network
operators in Europe for the prices to pay for UMTS-frequency bands.
Therefore, the first goal when designing future wireless
communication systems (e.g. 4G - fourth generation) has to be the
increase in spectral efficiency. The development in digital
communications in the past years has enabled efficient modulation
and coding techniques for robust and spectral efficient data,
speech, audio and video transmission. These are the multi-carrier
modulation (e.g. OFDM) and the spread spectrum technique (e.g.
DS-CDMA), where OFDM was chosen for broadcast applications (DVB,
DAB) as well as for broadband wireless indoor standards (ETSI
HIPERLAN-II, IEEE-802.11) and the DS-CDMA was selected in mobile
communications (IS-95, third generation mobile radio systems world
wide, UMTS/IMT 2000).

Since 1993 various combinations of multi-carrier (MC) modulation
and the spread spectrum (SS) technique have been introduced and the
field of MC-SS communications has become an independent and
important research topic with increasing activities. New
application fields have been proposed such as high rate cellular
mobile, high rate wireless indoor and LMDS. It has been shown that
MC-SS offers the high spectral efficiency, robustness and
flexibility that is required for the next generation systems.
Meanwhile, different alternative hybrid schemes such as OFDM/OFDMA,
MC-TDMA, etc. have been deeply analysed and adopted in different
international standards (ETSI-BRAN, IEEE-802 & MMAC).

Multi-Carrier & Spread-Spectrum: Analysis of Hybrid Air
Interfaces draws together all of the above mentioned hybrid schemes
therefore providing a greatly needed resource for system engineers,
telecommunication designers and researchers in order to enable them
to develop, build and deploy several schemes based on
MC-transmission for the next generation systems (which will be an
integration of broadband multimedia services covering both 4G
mobile and fixed wireless systems).

* Offers a complete treatment of multi-carrier, spread-spectrum
(SS) and time division multiplexing (TDM) techniques

* Provides an in-depth insight into hybrid multiple access
techniques based on multi-carrier (MC) transmission

* Presents numerous hybrid multiple access and air interface
architectures including OFDM/CDMA, MC-CDMA, MC-DS-CDMA and
MT-CDMA

* Covers new techniques such as space-time coding and software
radio

Telecommunications engineers, hardware & software system
designers and researchers as well as students, lecturers and
technicians will all find this an invaluable addition to their
bookshelf.