CHAPTER 1

BACKGROUND OF WIRELESS COMMUNICATIONS

In 1897, Guglielmo Marconi demonstrated radio’s ability to provide continuous contact

with ships sailing across the English Channel. Since then, numerous advances have been made in
the field of wireless communications. Numerous experiments were carried out by different
researchers to make use of electromagnetic waves to carry information.

1.1 Cellular Systems – The Past

The first public mobile telephone service was launched in the United States in the year
1946. Distances up to 50 km were covered using a single, high-powered transmitter on a large
tower. These services offered only half duplex mode (only one person could talk at a time) and
used 120 kHz of RF bandwidth. Only 3 kHz of baseband spectrum was required but due to
hardware limitations, 120 kHz was used. By the mid 1960s, due to technology advancements, the
bandwidth for voice transmissions was cut down to 30 kHz. By this time, automatic channel
trunking was introduced under the label IMTS (Improved Mobile Telephone Service) which also
offered full duplex service. However, IMTS quickly became saturated since they had few
channels and a very large population to serve as discussed by Rappaport [1].
In the 1960s, the AT&T Bell Laboratories and other telecommunication companies
developed the technique of cellular radiotelephony – the concept of breaking a coverage area into
small cells, each of which reused portions of the spectrum to increase spectrum usage at the
expense of greater system infrastructure. Figure 1.1 shows the concept of frequency reuse. A cell
using frequency f1 has to be located at a particular distance away from another cell using the

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same frequency to prevent interference. Thus same frequencies would not be used in adjacent
cells. The reuse distance depends on the number of cells forming a cluster which uses all the
available frequencies.

f2
f1 f3
f7
f6 f4 Reuse
f5 distance
f3 f1
f2

Figure 1.1 Frequency Reuse pattern

The entire spectrum allocated by the FCC was divided into a number of channels and
these channels were used in the cells. Channels would be reused only when there would be
sufficient distance between the transmitters to prevent interference. In 1983, the FCC (Federal
Communications Commission) allocated channels for the AMPS (Advanced Mobile Phone
System) in the range 824-894 MHz. In order to encourage competition and keep prices low, the
U. S. government required the presence of two carriers in every market. Each carrier was
assigned 832 frequencies: 790 for voice and 42 for data. A pair of frequencies (one for transmit
and one for receive) was used to create one channel. The frequencies used in analog voice
channels are typically 30 kHz wide, hence 30 kHz was chosen as the standard size because it
gave voice quality comparable to a wired telephone. The transmit and receive frequencies of
each voice channel were separated by 45 MHz to keep them from interfering with each other.
The AMPS used analog FM along with FDMA [1].
In 1991, the first digital system was installed in major US cities. This system was called
the USDC (U.S. Digital Cellular) and it used digital modulation along with TDMA to give three
times improved capacity. It used the same frequency range as the AMPS, i.e. 824-894 MHz. The

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IS-95 was the next digital system launched in 1993 and this used CDMA. It had a channel
bandwidth of 1.25 MHz and used QPSK/BPSK modulation.

1.2 Cellular Systems – The Present

Further improvements and advances in technology led to the PCS (Personal

Communication Services) in 1995. One example of a PCS system is the DCS-1900 which uses
the 1850-1990 MHz band and is in use today. This system is based on TDMA and has 200-kHz
channel spacing and eight time slots. The system also provides services like paging, caller ID,
and e-mail. In a PCS system, the cells are further divided into macrocells, microcells and
picocells to facilitate better coverage as shown in Figure 1.2 (www.ee.washington.edu).

Figure 1.2 Cell structure for PCS

1.3 Cellular Systems – Vision for the Future

According to the Cellular Telecommunications Industry Association (CTIA), today there

exist more than 60 million wireless customers. This figure is hard to imagine considering the fact
that cellular service was invented about 50 years ago. Over the last 25 years, the wireless market

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has grown steadily from a $3 billion market to a $30 billion market in terms of annual revenues
as indicated by [2].

Figure 1.3 The future vision

Figure 1.3 (www.web.bham.ac.uk) shows the vision of the future. An integrated

terrestrial/satellite multimedia system is envisioned. Global personal communication is to be
supported via satellites using the satellite gateways to connect to the fixed ground network.
Underground cable, optical fibers or fixed radio links would be used to link the gateways to the
fixed networks. The fixed networks would be connected to cellular base stations providing radio
links to mobile hand sets or hand set units on vehicles. Indoor base stations located in offices and
public places such as bus and rail stations, airports and shops would also be connected to the
fixed network. In areas which cannot be provided coverage by terrestrial base stations or fixed
networks, satellites would be used to connect to the personal handsets.

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 Hence, in the future, the handsets would be such that they would support multimedia
which is an integration of voice, data and video signals. Thus, the user would have access to a
very wide range of services such as telephone, fax, electronic mail, world wide web, video
conferencing, remote shopping and emergency services [3].
In the present world cordless, indoor and other types of cellular phones are available for
different applications. In the future, a single handset will be used to serve all applications. The
handset may be used by the user when he is at his home. The same handset would then be
connected to the cellular network when the user would be in his car. When the user reaches his
workplace, the same handset can be connected to the office cordless system. Moreover, on a
business trip, the user would use the handset through the satellite as shown in Figure 1.4 [3].

Figure 1.4 User at home, in car, at office, at business trip

1.4 Inside a Cellular Phone

Cellular phones are some of the most intricate devices people use on a daily basis.
Modern digital cell phones can process millions of calculations per second in order to compress
and decompress the voice stream.

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 Figure 1.5 Internal components of a NOKIA cellular phone

If you take a cell phone apart, you find that it contains just a few individual parts as seen
in Figure 1.5 (http://electronics.howstuffworks.com/):
• A circuit board containing the different processors
• A liquid crystal display (LCD)
• A keypad
• A microphone
• A speaker
• A battery
• An Antenna
In the last ten years, the wireless communications industry has grown by orders of
magnitude, fueled by digital and RF circuit fabrication improvements, new large-scale circuit
integration, and other miniaturization technologies which make portable radio equipment
smaller, cheaper, and more reliable. Figure 1.6 (Motorola Inc) shows the cellular handset that
was used with the AMPS system in 1983.

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 Figure 1.6 Cellular handset used with the AMPS system

Figure 1.7 (http://www.nttdocomo.co.jp) shows the kind of cellular handsets that were
available in the past and it is seen that over a period of years, the handsets are becoming smaller
and lighter. In order to achieve such smaller designs, it is necessary that each component of the
cellular phone is made small. Advancement in VLSI technologies ensures smaller microchips
which are used for various signal processing needs.

Figure 1.7 Cellular handsets used in the past few years

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 Among the other components, that can be made small, there arises a need for a smaller
and a low profile antenna. If the antenna can be made smaller, then it would ensure a compact
cellular phone. The design of such a compact and low profile antenna, to be used in the future
cellular/PCS handsets, is the aim of this thesis.