Dear Dennis...
EN-Genius Network's Dennis Feucht answers your design
queries in his new Circuit Design Clinic!
May, 2008
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EN-Genius Network presents a new, interactive
analog design service to readers! Send us your design questions (with
relevant data; schematics in JPEG or GIF, please) for some free
engineering advice from EN-Genius Network's circuit
consultant, Dennis Feucht, on how you might solve a design problem or
improve circuit performance. Submissions may be edited for clarity or
brevity, and submitters and their email addresses will remain anonymous
(unless otherwise indicated). Please send your questions to Dennis here.
Wireless Networking
by Dennis L Feucht
by Praphul Chandra et. al. (6 authors), Published by Newnes
ISBN 13: 978-0-7506-8582-5, paperback, 576 pp, $59.95, November 2007
This book is part of the Newnes Know It All series, and the result of a group effort, including that of previously-reviewed, prolific author Daniel Dobkin. Like the previous Know It All book reviewed by EN-Genius, RF & Wireless Technologies, this book has a broad coverage of communications concepts and overlaps in content with the previous book. Some chapters look like they are essentially the same as corresponding chapters in the other work. This book, however, takes somewhat more of an electronics-oriented approach. Dobkin does a nice job of covering radio circuits, with insightful illustrations.
Radio propagation and antennas are similarly covered without drowning the design engineer in a deep ocean of integral equations with vector integrands. Math does appear and is about right for the designer whose mind is on circuit synthesis and not as much on fields theory for its own sake. Communications protocols and modulations are clearly presented in the basics, but fall a little short of sending the reader away to implement them. The chapter on high-speed wireless data also is a good overview but does not go into very much implementation detail. Propagation modeling and measuring takes us quickly to city maps, and indoor networking to the electrical aspects of building construction, with enough detail to satisfy anyone but a civil engineer. Bluetooth versus Wi-Fi is discussed in this context. A repeat chapter (from RF & Wireless Technologies) on wireless security is followed by voice over Wi-Fi, unlicensed mobile access, IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS), and various voice-over variants.
Mobile ad hoc, sensor, and industrial networking chapters essentially repeat what is in RF & Wireless Technologies. General communication encoding concepts, such as the OSI reference model, then appear with some layering explanation and some circuits-level ideas of how to implement modulation for the physical layer. A good overview of Bluetooth and Wi-Fi follows. The book ends with another repeat chapter on geographically-oriented communications system design.
The content of this book overlaps significantly with RF & Wireless Technologies in that perhaps half the chapters appear in both books. For the cost-conscious book buyer, it is an either-or decision between them. I would opt for the larger, previously-reviewed book.
This book similarly offers a Newnes free online membership that entitles one to some downloads of additional material. The CD contains Chandra’s 15 MathCAD worksheets, mainly for radio circuit design, and they too appear to be the same as on the CD of the already over-cited previous book. Product differentiation between books is not immense and can probably be made on a pure page-per-dollar basis.
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