Mobile Clouds: Exploiting Distributed Resources in Wireless, Mobile and Social Networks

4

Wireless Communication Technologies

The wireless telegraph is not difficult to understand. The ordinary telegraph is like a very long cat. You pull the tail in New York, and it meows in Los Angeles. The wireless is the same, only without the cat.

attributed to Albert Einstein

In this chapter we briefly describe wireless and mobile technologies, the component networks needed to form mobile clouds. Two types of communications approaches will be discussed, namely cellular and short–range technologies. The capabilities and limitations of these systems will determine the way these component networks cooperate and will ultimately determine the performance of the mobile cloud.

4.1 Introduction

There are many types of wireless technologies integrated on mobile devices that could be used to build up the mobile cloud. In the following subsections these mobile and wireless communications technologies will be presented briefly. The main focus is on cellular and short–range communications technologies. Mobile and wireless communications technologies evolved following different developing paths, sometimes referred to as the mobile or cellular path, and the wireless path, respectively. First we will discuss the cellular evolution path, introducing the key representative technologies of the mobile communications generations. Next, wireless local area network (WLAN) or Wi–Fi technologies are presented, namely different versions of IEEE802.11 and Bluetooth. Figure 4.1 depicts the supported ...