Networking Fundamentals: Wide, Local and Personal Area Communications

Focusing on the physical layer, Networking Fundamentals provides essential information on networking technologies that are used in both wired and wireless networks designed for local area networks (LANs) and wide-area networks (WANs). The book starts with an overview of telecommunications followed by four parts, each including several chapters. Part I explains the principles of design and analysis of information networks at the lowest layers. It concentrates on the characteristics of the transmission media, applied transmission and coding, and medium access control. Parts II and III are devoted to detailed descriptions of important WANs and LANs respectively with Part II describing the wired Ethernet and Internet as well as cellular networks while Part III covers popular wired LANs and wireless LANs (WLANs), as well as wireless personal area network (WPAN) technologies. Part IV concludes by examining security, localization and sensor networking. The partitioned structure of the book allows flexibility in teaching the material, encouraging the reader to grasp the more simple concepts and to build on these foundations when moving onto more complex information.

Networking Fundamentals contains numerous illustrations, case studies and tables to supplement the text, as well as exercises with solutions at the end of each chapter.

• Provides a unique holistic approach covering wireless communication technologies, wired technologies and networking
• One of the first textbooks to integrate all aspects of information networks while placing an emphasis on the physical layer and systems engineering aspects
• Contains numerous illustrations, case studies and tables to supplement the text, as well as exercises with solutions at the end of each chapter

About the Authors

Kaveh Pahlavan, is a Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE), a Professor of Computer Science (CS), and Director of the Center for Wireless Information Network Studies, Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI), Worcester, MA. He is also a visiting Professor of Telecommunication Laboratory and CWC, University of Oulu, Finland. His area of research is location-aware broadband wireless indoor networks. He has contributed to numerous seminal technical publications and patents in this field. He is the principal author of the Wireless Information Networks (with Allen Levesque), John Wiley and Sons, 1995 and Principles of Wireless Networks – A Unified Approach (with P. Krishnamurthy), Prentice Hall, 2002. He has been a consultant to a number of companies, including CNR Inc., GTE Laboratories, Steinbrecher Corp., Simplex, Mercury Computers, WINDATA, SieraComm, 3COM, and Codex/Motorola in Massachusetts; JPL, Savi Technologies, RadioLAN in California; Aironet in Ohio; United Technology Research Center in Connecti-cut; Honeywell in Arizona; Nokia, LK-Products, Elektrobit, TEKES, the Finnish Academy in Finland; and NTT in Japan. Before joining WPI, he was the director of advanced development at Infinite Inc., Andover, MA, working on data communications. He started his career as an assistant professor at Northeastern University, Boston, MA. He is the Editor-in-Chief of the International Journal on Wireless Information Networks. He was the founder, the program chairman, and organizer of the IEEE Wireless LAN Workshop, Worcester, in 1991 and 1996 and the organizer and technical program chairman of the IEEE International Symposium on Personal, Indoor, and Mobile Radio Communications, Boston, MA, 1992 and 1998. He has also been selected as a member of the Committee on Evolution of Untethered Communication, US National Research Council, 1997 and has led the US review team for the Finnish R&D Programs in Electronic and Telecommunication in 1999 and NETs project in 2003. For his contributions to the wireless networks he was the Westin Hadden Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at WPI during 1993–1996, was elected as a fellow of the IEEE in 1996 and became a fellow of Nokia in 1999. From May to December of 2000 he was the first Fulbright– Nokia scholar at the University of Oulu, Finland. Because of his inspiring visionary publications and his international conference activities for the growth of the wireless LAN industry, he is referred to as one of the founding fathers of the wireless LAN industry. In the past few years his research work has been the core for more than 25 patents by Skyhook Wireless, where he acts as the chief technical advisor. In January 2008 Steve Jobs announced that Skyhook Wireless's WiFi localization technology is used in iPhone.

Prashant Krishnamurthy is an associate professor with the graduate program in Telecommunications and Networking at the University of Pittsburgh. At Pitt, he regularly teaches courses on cryptography, network security, and wireless communications and networks. His research interests are wireless network security, wireless data networks, and position location in indoor wireless networks. He is the coauthor of the books Principles of Wireless Networks – A Unified Approach and Physical Layer of Communication Systems and is a co-editor of Information Assurance: Dependability and Security in Networked Systems. He served as the chair of the IEEE Communications Society Pittsburgh Chapter from 2000 to 2005. He obtained his PhD from Worcester Polytechnic Institute, Worcester, MA, in 1999.