Concentrates on quantitative methods such as modelling and performance analysis

"This book covers the principles of both wired and wireless communications of voice, data, images, and video and the impact of their business values on the organizations in which they are used"--Provided by publisher.

The rapid development of optical fiber transmission technology has created the possibility for constructing digital networks that are as ubiquitous as the current voice network but which can carry video, voice, and data in massive qlJantities. How and when such networks will evolve, who will pay for them, and what new applications will use them is anyone's guess. There appears to be no doubt, however, that the trend in telecommunication networks is toward far greater transmission speeds and toward greater heterogeneity in the requirements of different applications. This book treats some of the central problems involved in these networks of the future. First, how does one switch data at speeds orders of magnitude faster than that of existing networks? This problem has roots in both classical switching for telephony and in switching for packet networks. There are a number of new twists here, however. The first is that the high speeds necessitate the use of highly parallel processing and place a high premium on computational simplicity. The second is that the required data speeds and allowable delays of different applications differ by many orders of magnitude. The third is that it might be desirable to support both point to point applications and also applications involving broadcast from one source to a large set of destinations.

This is an elementary textbook on an advanced topic: broadband telecommunica tion networks. I must declare at the outset that this book is not primarily intended for an audience of telecommunication specialists who are weIl versed in the concepts, system architectures, and underlying technologies of high-speed, multi media, bandwidth-on-demand, packet-switching networks, although the techni caIly sophisticated telecommunication practitioner may wish to use it as a refer ence. Nor is this book intended to be an advanced textbook on the subject of broadband networks. Rather, this book is primarily intended for those eager to leam more about this exciting fron tier in the field of telecommunications, an audience that includes systems designers, hardware and software engineers, en gineering students, R&D managers, and market planners who seek an understand ing of local-, metropolitan-, and wide-area broadband networks for integrating voice, data, image, and video. Its primary audience also includes researchers and engineers from other disciplines or other branches of telecommunications who anticipate a future involvement in, or who would simply like to leam more about, the field of broadband networks, along with scientific researchers and corporate telecommunication and data communication managers whose increasingly sophis ticated applications would benefit from (and drive the need for) broadband net works. Advanced topics are certainly not ignored (in fact, a plausible argument could be mounted that aIl of the material is advanced, given the infancy of the topic).

Written by experts directly involved in the B-ISDN standards evolution, this book introduces the idea of integrated networks, and gives an overview of the current standardization situation. It discusses existing broadband networks based on the arising international standards, and explains how ATM is the basis for B-ISDN.

Optical networks, undersea networks, GSM, UMTS The recent explosion in broadband communications technologies has opened a new world of fast, flexible services and applications. To successfully implement these services, however, requires a solid understanding of the concepts and capabilities of broadband technologies and networks. Building Br

Integrated broadband networks (IBNs), when compared to high definition television, are seen by many as probably being more important to the future industrial competitiveness of the United States in the telecommunications field, and as certainly raising far more complex issues of economics, law, regulation, and social impact. The first concerted attempt to identify and investigate these issues was started in 1987 by a leading US telecommunications policy research center. This book presents key contributions to that study, each written by a leading authority in his field. Its breadth of coverage does justice to the multifaceted nature of the core policy issues; its scholarly standards make it a valuable resource for future researchers; and its relevance to immediate policy concerns makes it required reading for those who need to understand what will continue to be a highly controversial public debate for a long time to come.