ABSTRACT

Cellular communications systems have been developed and commercialized since the advent of the advanced mobile phone system (AMPS) [1], whose initial commercial deployments date back to 1981 but existed in the lab for nearly two decades prior. Since AMPS was intended to provide full terrestrial coverage for mobile users, a distributed network architecture using the cellular paradigm was employed. This meant that a large number of base stations (fixed location transceivers that are networked with each other), each with its own coverage area (or cell), to communicate with mobile equipment. The primary service offered was full-duplex voice telephony. AMPS is a primarily analog transmission system, using frequency-division multiple access (FDMA) as its underlying networking solution. These early analog cellular communications systems are also known as “first generation.”