Wcdma for Umts: Radio Access for Third Generation Mobile Communications, Revised Edition

Otherwise it might be somehow confusing. This book is a must for professionals as another reviewer stated but it is not very suitable as the first book on UMTS technologies. This book serves best as supplementary reading. For example new-beginner readers might get confused talkink about SIP at the first chapter before explaining W-CDMA and core-network layout. Anyway, this book contains wealth of information on UMTS technologies and warmly recommended for serious readers.

This book delivers exactly what it promises: a profound, compact and clear description of WCDMA for UMTS. The reader is expected to understand quite advanced concepts of mobile communications, hence it is not a good book for managers who want to know what 3G is all about nor for undergraduate students who want to learn cellular system basics. It is an excellent book for experienced network planners, protocol designers or research engineers, for example, who want to move from 2G to 3G. Simple test: if you don't know what are Erlang-B, orthogonal codes or layered protocol architecture, you want to study them first from another book.

This book is the only one available now about UMTS, which based on 3GPP standard and show you some simulation results of research. It is no doubt this book gives a full picture for a technical person who is interested in UMTS system. It is worth to start from this book and keep one as a reference, no mater how many books about UMTS will be published later.

This book provides a good introduction to 3GPP Release '99 and helps you navigate the standard. The main focus is on the DS-CDMA radio interface. The book is useful for people with a knowledge of GSM wanting to know about WCDMA. If there is any weakness in the book it is the lack of coverage of Services & Applications.

Whoever read the 3GPP standardization documents for UMTS knows how hard and time consuming it is to extract all the relevant information. Holma and Toskala's book is not just a collection of the 3GPP documents it is bringing light into them. Many plots of system simulations are given. It certainly helps you saving valuble time in getting up to date information about one of the hottest telecommunication applications nowadays. Read this book and you will understand the UMTS standard.