Systems engineering in the personal communications link programme

The Government LINK research initiative in Personal Communications (PC) was launched in 1988 to bring together industrial and academic research groups working in a continuously evolving telecommunications environment. It is anticipated that over the next decade there will be a rapidly growing demand for radio connected access to European telecommunications systems. Whilst much research has lead to the formulation of the GSM Pan-European digital cellular radio standard, this may not have the capacity for mass market penetration to produce the ubiquitous `Personal Communicator´. The advent of the CT-2 digital cordless telephone system in this country and the future Digital European Cordless Telephone (DECT) standard will produce a cheap handset with limited mobility via a microcell `telepoint´ infrastructure, albeit with no inter-cell handover. The PC programme targets the telecommunications environment which will be developing from the mid-90´s to the early years of the next century; that is, in the medium term dealing with enhancements to GSM and DECT while in the longer term addressing the concept of Universal Personal Communication Networks. In order to focus the research within PC on the key technological and techno-economic issues, the requirement was recognised for an early Systems Engineering Study, reporting regularly to the programme management committee