Cisco Press has published many technical books about their products and about networking in general. But this book is a little atypical in that it seems to have far more detailed content. Also and perhaps pleasantly to some readers, the level of detail is not about an exhaustive explanation of the features of some Cisco product. You could construe this book as a timely discourse on numerous industry efforts at the intersection and integration of mobile networking (which is effectively equivalent to the use of cellphones) and the Internet.

One topic bruited about is the use of femtocells to improve cellular reach; especially inside buildings. Three methods are given – WiMax, UTMS and cdma2000. A chapter gives a detailed scrutiny of the latter.

For the Internet, there is much about IPv6. It seems far easier to handle cellphones and the movement of these via IPv6 than shoehorning the problem into IPv4. The reader might be struck by the idea that this, finally, could be what drives a large scale deployment of IPv6.

We also see that within IPv6, advances have been made. There are details of an improved next generation IPv6. Chapter 4 seems to be a key section of the book. Titled “An IP Refresher”, it does not just cover the usual beginner’s stuff about v4 and v6, but delves into cutting edge material.

Later portions of the book also explain how the 3G and 4G cellphone levels might evolve and tie into the Internet. The text is a useful complement to these recent offerings on 4g – IP for 4G by Wisely, and 4G Roadmap and Emerging Communication Technologies (Universal Personal Communications) by Kim.
Rating: 4 / 5

The book’s goal is to provide information on the current and near future state of mobile networks and its evolution to all IP based mobile network. It discusses the key technology trends and concepts for mobile network but it does not provide any recommendation on which technology is the best.

The book assumes that the readers have at least intermediate or advanced level of knowledge on Internet Protocol (IP) and other network technologies such as IP addressing, dynamic routing, multicast, BGP, MPLS, 802.11 wireless networking and basic understanding of Radio Access Networks (RAN). It is mainly written for network engineers looking to design, implement or understand the technology concepts and trends for mobile network.

The book starts with chapter introducing various basic radio technologies such as propagation, modulation, radio degradation mitigation and different access technologies such as TDMA (time division), FDMA (frequency division), CDMA (code division) and the new SDMA (space division). The last one is an emerging technology using the publicly familiar Multiple-Input Multiple-Output (MIMO) techniques, to increase throughput and coverage.

Then the book jumps into detail discussing the concepts, architecture and performance aspects of various cellular access systems from the legacy Global System for Mobile (GSM), Wideband CDMA (WCDMA) to the current 3G technologies such as High Speed Downlink Packet Access (HSDPA) and Evolution Data Only (EVDO).

The following chapter discusses the future evolution of mobile network to adopt all IP access systems that include Microwave Access (WiMAX) and Long Term Evolution (LTE) which is marketed as 4G system technologies that can support 100 Mbps throughput for mobile users. .

I skipped most of the parts of the chapter that describes basic IP routing protocols and concepts. However, the last part of the chapter is interesting as it describes how the mobile network uses tunneling with encryption to deliver data to mobile user end system without exposing their network core to the internet. This is quite a challenge since mobile IP hosts frequently moves from one routing domain to another.

The last few chapters discuss IP connectivity and evolution to IP based core mobile network and Intelligent Network (IN) which can enforce traffic policies (think QoS) based on subscriber, device or application and the evolution of the framework to IP Multimedia Subsytem (IMS) which allow end to end context awareness to launch services such as VoIP, video delivery and others..

The authors have done a good job covering these various mobile technologies and discussing them in details. It however does not include URL links to web sites so readers can get more detail information. That should not matter since a simple Google search will do the job. The delivery is also rather dry but I believe that is expected for a technical subject like this.

I rate this book 4 out of 5 and recommend the book for people who want to learn more about the design for the Radio Access Networks (RAN).
Rating: 4 / 5

IP DESIGN FOR MOBILE NETWORKS is a powerful recommendation discussing IP design theory and implementation for mobile networks. Standards and design theory discuss the state and ideal of mobile networks, reviewing how IP is being integrated into these systems and the technologies evolving to embrace IP systems. Any advanced programmer’s library needs this.

Rating: 5 / 5