While there are countless books on wireless networks, few actually quantify the key performance-limiting factors of wireless local area networks (WLANs) and describe various methods for improving WLAN performance. Fulfilling these needs, Improving the Performance of Wireless LANs: A Practical Guide provides both theoretical background and empirical

Finally--an 802.11 deployment guide for business and home use that demystifies the alphabet soup of IEEE standards and explains the features and benefits of each with regards to speeds and feeds.

Wireless network technologies and standards. Analyzing the need for wireless networks. Implementing and supporting wireless networks. Appendixes.

Annotation Deploy and optimize your wireless LAN using the new standard for broadband wireless communication, OFDM. A comprehensive reference written by two experts who helped create the OFDM specifications. A detailed, practical guide to OFDM WLANs does not exist, requiring readers to seek out multiple sources of information, such as white papers and research notes. Detailed explanations of the concepts and algorithms behind OFDM-context that is missing from the two OFDM books currently available. This book explains OFDM WLAN basics, including components of OFDM and multicarrier WLAN standards. It provides a practical approach to OFDM by including software and hardware examples and detailed implementation explanations. OFDM Multicarrier Wireless Networks: A Practical Approach defines and explains the mathematical concepts behind OFDM necessary for successful OFDM WLAN implementations. Juha Heiskala is a research engineer at Nokia Research Center in Irving, TX. Heiskala is active in the IEEE 802.11 standards bodies and has been tasked with developing the 802.11a system simulation on several software platforms. He is the inventor/co-inventor of three pending patents in the area of OFDM LANs and co-designed with Dr. John Terry the modulation and coding scheme for achieving 100 Mbps speeds within currently allocated band specifications for OFDM WLANs. John Terry, Ph.D. is a senior research engineer at Nokia Research Center. He is currently managing the OFDM modulation and coding project in the HSA group. Dr. Terry has published several white papers, given numerous presentations on wireless communications, and generated four patents related to OFDM WLANs. He has 10 years of experience working in wireless communications, including tenures at NASA Glen Research Center and Texas Instruments.

The first generation 802.11 wireless market, once struggling to expand, has spread from largely vertical applications such as healthcare, point of sale, and inventory management to become much more broad as a general networking technology being deployed in offices, schools, hotel guest rooms, airport departure areas, airplane cabins, entertainment venues, coffee shops, restaurants, and homes. This has led to the tremendous growth of new sources of IEEE 802.11 devices. IEEE 802.11 equipment is now moving into its second stage, where the wireless LAN is being treated as a large wireless communication system. As a system, there is more to consider than simply the communication over the air between a single access point and the associated mobile devices. This has lead to innovative changes in the equipment that makes up a wireless LAN. The IEEE 802.11 Handbook: A Designer’s Companion, Second Edition is for the system network architects, hardware engineers and software engineers at the heart of this second stage in the evolution of 802.11 wireless LANs and for those designers that will take 802.11 to the next stage.

The huge and growing demand for wireless communication systems has spurred a massive effort on the parts of the computer science and electrical engineering communities to formulate ever-more efficient protocols and algorithms. Written by a respected figure in the field, Handbook of Wireless Networks and Mobile Computing is the first book to cover the subject from a computer scientist's perspective. It provides detailed practical coverage of an array of key topics, including cellular networks, channel assignment, queuing, routing, power optimization, and much more.

Consisting of 25 articles contributed by expert authors from around the world, this handbook begins with a detailed introduction that provides an overview of LAN technologies, performance, security, and security protocols. It then delves further into WLAN technology, covering space-time processing, WLAN and cellular convergence, and a peer-to-peer approach to roaming, along with other topics. The Handbook continues by exploring WLAN applications, followed by an extensive discussion of security that includes the steps that can be taken to minimize WLAN security risks. This text concludes with an analysis of standards, describing 3G UMTS - IEEE 802.11b internetworking and security.