Understanding Communications Networks - for Emerging Cybernetics Applications

-Information networking has emerged as a multidisciplinary diversified area of research over the past few decades. From traditional wired telephony to cellular voice telephony and from wired access to wireless access to the Internet, information networks have profoundly impacted our lifestyles as they have undergone enormous growth. To understand this technology, students need to learn several disciplines and develop an intuitive feeling of how they interact with one another. To achieve this goal, the book describes important networking standards, classifying their underlying technologies in a logical manner and gives detailed examples of successful applications. The emergence of wireless access and dominance of the Ethernet in LAN technologies has shifted the innovations in networking towards the physical layer and characteristics of the medium. This book pays attention to the physical layer while we provide fundamentals of information networking technologies which are used in wired and wireless networks designed for local and wide area operations. The book provides a comprehensive treatment of the wired IEEE802.3 Ethernet, and Internet as well as ITU cellular 2G-6G wireless networks, IEEE 802.11 for Wi-Fi, and IEEE 802.15 for Bluetooth, ZigBee and ultra-wideband (UWB) technologies. The novelty of the book is that it places emphasis on physical communications issues related to formation and transmission of packets and characteristics of the medium for transmission in variety of networks. Material presented in the book will be beneficial for students of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Computer Science, Robotics Engineering, Biomedical Engineering, or other disciplines who are interested in integration of navigation into their multi-disciplinary projects. The book provides examples with supporting MATLAB codes and hands-on projects throughout to improve the ability of the readers to understand and implement variety of algorithms.

Kaveh Pahlavan is a Professor of ECE, a Professor of CS, and Director of the Center for Wireless Information Network Studies, Worcester Polytechnic Institute, Worcester, MA. Since the inception of Skyhook Wireless, Boston, MA (2005), the world's pioneer in Wi-Fi localization for smart devices, he has been the chief technical advisor of the company. From 1995 to 2007, he had a long-term and productive cooperation with the University of Oulu and Nokia in Finland (1995-2007). He is renowned for his pioneering research in Wi-Fi and indoor geolocation and has contributed to numerous seminal visionary papers and key patents related to these areas. His current area of research is localization techniques and location-based security for body area networks. He is the author of several pioneering textbooks translated and taught around the world in several languages. He is the founding Editor-in-Chief of the International Journal Wireless Information Networks, Springer, which was established in 1994 as the first journal in wireless networks. He has founded, chaired and organized a number of pioneering international events in wireless access and localization, which includes Workshops on Opportunistic RF Localization for Emerging Smart Devices, (2008, 2010, 2012). For his pioneering entrepreneurship activities in the growth of wireless networking industry, he has been selected as a member of the Committee on Evolution of Untethered Communication, US National Research Council (1997) and has led the US team for the review of the Finnish National R&D Programs (2000 and 2003). For his contributions in research and scholarship, he was theWestin Hadden Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at WPI (1993-1996), elected as a fellow of the IEEE (1996), became the first non-Finn fellow of the Nokia (1999), received the first Fulbright-Nokia fellowship (2000), and received WPI board of trustee's award for Outstanding Research and Creative Scholarship (2011). Recently, he has received an "overseas famous scholar award" from R.I. China to serve as a visiting professor at University of Science and Technology of Beijing (2019-2021).

Understanding Communications Networks - for Emerging Cybernetics Applications