| This books presents the research work of COST 273 Towards Mobile Broadband Multimedia
Networks, hence, it reports on the work performed and on the results achieved within the project
by its participants. The material presented here corresponds to the results obtained in four years
of collaborative work by more than 350 researchers from 137 institutions (universities, operators,
manufacturers, regulators, independent laboratories and others – a full list is provided in Appendix
B) belonging to 29 countries (mainly European, but also from Asia and North America) in the area of
mobile radio. The objective of publishing these results as a book is essentially to make them available
to an audience wider than the project. In fact, it just follows a ‘tradition’ of previous COST Actions
in this area of telecommunications, i.e. COST 207, 231 and 259.
The main objective of COST 273 was to increase the knowledge on the radio aspects of mobile
and wireless broadband multimedia networks, by exploring and developing new methods, models,
techniques, strategies and tools towards the implementation of 4th generation mobile and wireless
communication systems. As a secondary objective, it was intended that it should continue to play
a supporting role similar to the one played by previous Actions in this area, that is, beside giving
inputs to the development of systems beyond the 3rd generation, it was also expected that it would
contribute to the deployment of systems that are more or less standardised, like UMTS and WLANs.
The structure of the book is based on the structure of the project itself, i.e. chapters are roughly
mapped onto part of the work produced in a Working Group. There were a total of three Working
Groups: WG1 – Radio System Aspects; WG2 – Propagation and Antennas; WG3 – Radio Network
Aspects. A brief description of the project is given in Appendix A, so that readers who are not familiar
with the COST framework in general, and with COST 273 in particular, can have a glimpse of it. |
