OFDM for Wireless Multimedia Communications

Rating:
Summary: Low Quality Book Even for Artech House Standards
Review: Artech House, the folks that brought us poorly edited-or non-edited books bring you yet another example of self-referencing, poorly-written, cut and paste job. A very expensive one this time.

Of particular note is Chapter 5: Coherent and Differential Detection. Authors were busy copying and pasting covariance matrix entries but they forgot to check whether their equations for channel coefficients make sense. They dont.

In general, no attempt was made to provide insight. Self-advertisement, major errors, confused descriptions, pigeon English rule the land here. I wonder whether van Nee set up the organization of the book, and Prasad filled in the blanks, since the second author appears to be producing (I would not call that writing) too many books in a short time period. Where else, at Artech House of course.

Recommendation: Avoid.



Rating:
Summary: Disappointing content
Review: I agree with the reviewers who provided negative feedback. This book has gained reputation because it is one of the very first books on OFDM. I am not impressed with it. It is a mere represenation of Prasad and van Nee's papers, including some of the research projects they supervised. I didn't think the book was very helpful at all. The chapters are not as coherent as they should have been. Authors could have written a better book. You wouldn't want to buy the book if you wanted to learn and understand OFDM. If you are a practising engineer in this area, you will not learn anything new. If you are a graduate/PhD student, you won't learn everything about OFDM. Like some of the reviewers already said, only a few pages are useful (if they are).

Rating:
Summary: Disappointing content
Review: I agree with the reviewers who provided negative feedback. This book has gained reputation because it is one of the very first books on OFDM. I am not impressed with it. It is a mere represenation of Prasad and van Nee's papers, including some of the research projects they supervised. I didn't think the book was very helpful at all. The chapters are not as coherent as they should have been. Authors could have written a better book. You wouldn't want to buy the book if you wanted to learn and understand OFDM. If you are a practising engineer in this area, you will not learn anything new. If you are a graduate/PhD student, you won't learn everything about OFDM. Like some of the reviewers already said, only a few pages are useful (if they are).

Rating:
Summary: Re previous review
Review: I'm not sure how anybody who has read a book about OFDM can then claim that they don't understand how it deals with multipath. OFDM is designed specifically to deal with multipath so I doubt whether he/she has actually read this book properly. Also, the IFFT is a fundamental part of OFDM and if you don't understand this then you won't understand much else. I have not read the book but I have read papers by Ramjee Prasad and I don't believe that they have described OFDM so badly that a reader does not understand the basics concepts.

Actually, now I have read it I can confirm that it does describe how OFDM deals with multipath.
I would not say this is a particularly good book though. It is very short, especially for the price. There is so much research out there on OFDM and multicarrier CDMA that that you would expect a fair number of topics to be covered but it seems only the basics are covered and what's more this book is mainly just about the authors own research areas. For example, Prasad has published work on some variant of OFDM or MC-CDMA (I can't remember what it was because I borrowed the book from a library but I do know that this hasn't received much attention so I imagine it can't be that good) and there is a large proportion of the book on this and other topics that I wouldn't have expected to be covered when there is so much other material that could have been presented. This is unfortunate because there needs to be a decent OFDM book available (compare with the number of CDMA books out at the moment) and I have heard that the only other one isn't much better than this one.
All in all, if you're after useful OFDM or MC-CDMA material you only get about 40 or so pages worth. My advice would be to buy the other book if you have to have an OFDM book or if you have access to research papers stick to them ahead of buying this book. For example, if you are after material on MC-CDMA or its variants you won't learn anything (or very little) if you have read "Overview of Multicarrier CDMA" by Hara & Prasad.

Rating:
Summary: Not your ultimate OFDM book
Review: If you are looking for a book that clearly explains the mysteries of OFDM and COFDM then, you will have to wait. This is not that book. Much is left to "as an exercise for the student." There is some generic stuff on coding but how it relates to multipath mitigation is not clear. There are no good pictures of spectrums. The effect of amplifier non-linearities is inadequately addressed. The concept of IFFT as applied to modulation is not explained in a way you can understand it quickly. The section on coherent and differential detection is uneven in the amount of detail and understandability. The whole book has in places either too much math or not enough. There is no section on performance that tells you what the end to performance might be. Good try but far from perfect.

Charan Langton

Rating:
Summary: Book Description
Review: OFDM for Wireless Multimedia Communications is the first book to take a comprehensive look at OFDM, including a comparison with other forms of single carrier modulation methods. This timely and practical new volume provides the design guidelines you need to maximize benefits from this important new technology.

More than just a survey, you get practical guidance on how to plan, design, and use OFDM to make mobile multimedia communications happen. The book...

> Gives engineers a solid base for assessing the performance of wireless OFDM systems

> Explains how OFDM signals are formed using the Inverse Fast Fourier Transform, how the cyclic extension mitigates the effects of modulation, and how windowing can limit out-of-band radiation

> Discusses the sensitivity of OFDM to synchronization errors

> Examines the basics of direct sequence and frequency hopping CMDA, helpful in understanding combinations of OFDM and CDMA

> Explains Multicarrier CDMA, various transmitter architectures, and the pros and cons compared to other CDMA techniques

> Includes a discussion of the combination of OFDM and Frequency Hopping CDMA to get a multiple access system with similar advantages to direct sequence CDMA

Written by acknowledged experts in the field of mobile multimedia communications, this book also explains how Quadrature Amplitude Modulation is an effective modulation technique for OFDM subcarriers, and looks at applications of OFDM, including digital audio and video broadcasting, and wireless ATM. Loaded with essential figures and equations, it's a must-have resource for practicing communications engineers, researchers, academics, and students of communications technology.

Contents: Introduction. OFDM Basics. Coding and Modulation. Synchronization. Channel Estimation. The Peak Power Problem. Basics of CDMA. Multicarrier CDMA. OFDMA and Frequency Hopping CDMA. Applications of OFDM.

Richard D.J. van Nee, Ph.D. is a member of the technical staff at Lucent Technologies/Bell Labs in the Netherlands. He received his Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from Delft University, and his M.Sc. in Electrical Engineering from Twente University. Dr. van Nee was among those who proposed the OFDM-based physical layer, which was selected for standardization in IEEE 802.11, MMAC, and ETSI HiperLAN. Ramjee Prasad is Wireless Information and Multimedia Chair and Co-Director of the Center for Personkommunikation at Aalborg University. He is the author of CDMA for Wireless Personal Communications (Artech, 1996) and Universal Wireless Personal Communications (Artech, 1998). Dr. Prasad earned his Ph.D. in communications from the Birla Institute of Technology.

Rating:
Summary: A Good Book For Starting With OFDM
Review: OFDM is not a new technology. It was firstly introduced in 1960s. But until recently, OFDM was largely unknown. As OFDM seems to be the only technology for wideband wireless transmission, it became the past one year. OFDM was used in digital audio/video transmission, wireless LAN and is currently under investigation for wireless fixed point transmission. This is book is one of the only two books about OFDM available now, and I think it is a good book. It gives a quite complete overview about wireless transmission, and also addresses the main techniques used in OFDM, including sychronization, channel equalization, peak-average power problems, etc.. It is the right book for starting OFDM. The only shortcome of this book is that I found the references given were not enough.

Rating:
Summary: Good book for OFDM
Review: This is one of the best book regarding OFDM technology on the market. Its description of the OFDM and its history is concise, accurate, and intuitive. Lots of articles are cited, which is helpful for further studies. Also, the related industrial standards are referred, which make it a very practical reference, especially for the engineers in this field. It is basically product-oriented without too much rigid mathematical derivations. Whereas, it is not a book for beginners.