1 During the last 30 years, wireless in communications has grown from a niche market to an economically vital consumer mass market. The first wave, with the breakthrough of 2G mobile telephony focused on speech, placed wireless communication in the consumer mass market. In the current second wave, services are extended toward true multimedia, including interactive video, audio, gaming, and broadband Internet. These high-data rate services, however, led to a separate IP-centric family of wireless personal (WPANs) and local area networks (WLANs) outside the 2G/3G mobile path. Since diversity...

1 During the last 30 years, wireless in communications has grown from a niche market to an economically vital consumer mass market. The first wave, with the breakthrough of 2G mobile telephony focused on speech, placed wireless communication in the consumer mass market. In the current second wave, services are extended toward true multimedia, including interactive video, audio, gaming, and broadband Internet. These high-data rate services, however, led to a separate IP-centric family of wireless personal (WPANs) and local area networks (WLANs) outside the 2G/3G mobile path. Since diversity...