Wireless personal communications: what is it?

This article attempts to identify different issues and to put many of the activities in wireless into a framework that can provide perspective on what is driving them, and perhaps even yield some indication of where they appear to be going in the future. The technologies and systems that are currently providing, or are proposed to provide, wireless communications services can be grouped into about seven relatively distinct groups. All of the technologies and systems are evolving as technology advances and perceived needs change. Some trends are becoming evident in the evolutions. The different groups and evolutionary trends are explored along with factors that influence the characteristics of members of the groups. The grouping is generally with respect to scale of mobility and communications applications or modes. Different design compromises are evident in the different technologies and systems. The evidence suggests that the evolutionary trajectories are aimed toward at least three large groups of applications or services, namely, high-tier PCS (current cellular radio), high-speed wireless local-area networks (WLANS), and low-tier PCS (an evolution from several of the current groups). It is not clear to what extent several groups, e.g., cordless telephones, paging, and wide area data, will remain after some merging with the three large groups