Multimedia Wireless Networks: Technologies, Standards and QoS

Description

The book is cooking together information about WLAN, 802.11, 802.16, Bluetooth, 802.15, GPRS, UMTS and so forth. It gives a rudimentary overview of mostly the MAC of each standard (and sometimes also PHY and some higher layer protocols), especially with respect to available QoS mechanisms.Unfortunately, the book only scratches on the surface of each standard. It fails to give the big picture, instead it provides a mosaic of gory details. Sometimes, the pieces selected for presentation seems to be randomly selecled.The book describes "what" is in the standard (at least some pieces of it) but it fails to explain "why" things are like they are. The reason might be that the authors have not aquired a fundamental understanding of each of the standards presented. (It might be useful as a strange kind of manual, but not at all as a tutorial of any kind.)Finally, the book needs editing. It is frustrating with chopped figures, strange font policies for headings, and so forth.The book deserves a star because the last pages of Ch.2 and most of Ch. 3. provided a good overview of QoS that laid a basis for the rest of the book. Also, it must have been quite much work for the authors to gather together all this (incomplete pieces of) information from various standards.