Recently Geometric Programming has been applied to study a variety of problems in the analysis and design of communication systems from information theory and queuing theory to signal processing and network protocols. Geometric Programming for Communication Systems begins its comprehensive treatment of the subject by providing an in-depth tutorial on the theory, algorithms, and modeling methods of Geometric Programming. It then gives a systematic survey of the applications of Geometric Programming to the study of communication systems. It collects in one place various published results in this area, which are currently scattered in several books and many research papers, as well as to date unpublished results. Geometric Programming for Communication Systems is intended for researchers and students who wish to have a comprehensive starting point for understanding the theory and applications of geometric programming in communication systems.

In 1961, C. Zener, then Director of Science at Westinghouse Corpora tion, and a member of the U. S. National Academy of Sciences who has made important contributions to physics and engineering, published a short article in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences entitled" A Mathe matical Aid in Optimizing Engineering Design. " In this article Zener considered the problem of finding an optimal engineering design that can often be expressed as the problem of minimizing a numerical cost function, termed a "generalized polynomial," consisting of a sum of terms, where each term is a product of a positive constant and the design variables, raised to arbitrary powers. He observed that if the number of terms exceeds the number of variables by one, the optimal values of the design variables can be easily found by solving a set of linear equations. Furthermore, certain invariances of the relative contribution of each term to the total cost can be deduced. The mathematical intricacies in Zener's method soon raised the curiosity of R. J. Duffin, the distinguished mathematician from Carnegie Mellon University who joined forces with Zener in laying the rigorous mathematical foundations of optimizing generalized polynomials. Interes tingly, the investigation of optimality conditions and properties of the optimal solutions in such problems were carried out by Duffin and Zener with the aid of inequalities, rather than the more common approach of the Kuhn-Tucker theory.