Designed for multimedia communications, WCDMA will create numerous new business opportunities for manufacturers, operators, and content and applications providers. The second edition provides a deep understanding of the WCDMA air interface, its capabilities and its optimal usage - the key to success in the UMTS business, making this practical approach highly accessible to operators, network and terminal manufacturers, service providers, university students and frequency regulators.

• Explains the key parts of the 3GPP/WCDMA standard and the current status of UMTS licensing
• Presents network dimensioning and coverage and capacity for WCDMA including capacity upgrade paths and capacity per km2
• Introduces radio resource management algorithms and features inter-frequency hand-overs and inter-system hand-overs to GSM
• Examines the coverage and capacity of WCDMA up to 2Mbps using numerous simulation results and presents antenna diversity gain measurements in the WCDMA experimental system
• Introduces TDD and discusses its differences from FDD
• Discusses reference terminal classes

Key features of the 2nd edition include:

• New chapter on High Speed Downlink Packet Access, HSDPA
• New sections on IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS)

Expanded coverage of:

• TCP protocol over WCDMA packet channels
• Base station and mobile performance requirements
• WCDMA for the Americas - WCDMA1900