Wireless communications has become a field of enormous scientific and economic interest. Recent
success stories include 2G and 3G cellular voice and data services (e.g., GSM and UMTS), wireless
local area networks (WiFi/IEEE 802.11x), wireless broadband access (WiMAX/IEEE 802.16x), and
digital broadcast systems (DVB, DAB, DRM). On the physical layer side, traditional designs typically
assume that the radio channel remains constant for the duration of a data block. However, researchers
and system designers are increasingly shifting their attention to channels that may vary within a block.
In addition to time dispersion caused by multipath propagation, these rapidly time-varying channels
feature frequency dispersion resulting from the Doppler effect. They are, thus, often referred to as
being “doubly dispersive.”
