rative communication concepts, as well as reconfigurable RF and baseband circuitry in order to provide a higher quality of user experience, higher capacities, and a wider range of services with minimal cost and complexity. This page intentionally left blank Acknowledgements The author would like to acknowledge and sincerely thank his colleagues at Intel Corporation, ZTE Corporation, Samsung Electronics, Motorola, LG Electronics, the IEEE 802.16, and the 3GPP RAN groups for their contributions, consultation, and assistance in proofreading and improving the quality and content of the chapters of this book. The author would like to sincerely thank Academic Press (Elsevier) publishing and editorial staff for providing the author with the opportunity to publish this book and for their assistance, cooperation, patience, and understanding throughout the past two years. Finally, the author would like to thank his wife (Shahrnaz) and his children (Roya and Nima) for their unwavering encouragement, support, patience, and understanding throughout this long and challenging project. xxvii This page intentionally left blank CHAPTER Introduction to Mobile Broadband Wireless Access INTRODUCTION The last two decades have witnessed a rapid growth in the number of subscribers and incredible advancement in technology of cellular communication from simple, all-circuit-switched, analog first generation systems with limited voice service capabilities, limited mobility, and small capacity to the third generation systems with significantly increased capacity, advanced all-digital packet-switched all-IP implementations that offer a variety of multimedia services. With the increasing demand for high-quality wireless multimedia services, the radio access technologies continue to advance with faster pace toward the next generation of systems. The general characteristics envisioned for the fourth generation of the cellular systems include all-IP core networks, support for a wide range of user mobility, significantly improved user throughput a