Customer Reviews

Wireless OFDM Systems: How to make them work? (The Springer International Series in Engineering and Computer Science)

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I have invested all my efforts to understand what the authors are saying. Oops! I couldn't make it.
The authors have put together very little piece of work (compared with the amount of good work published in various journals/conferences etc), but the title of the book is really flamboyant, proving "much ado about nothing".
I do agree with some people on the review of other OFDM books about the poor FFT/IFFT explaination in this book. The book does not even have a nice system model which the readers can follow. Throughout the book, the authors provided only a birds-eye-view of the problem and the solutions (in all aspects of the system design). No analysis of whatsoever. The chapters are not even edited properly, as you can see some funny statements in the book (page.125, "Error! Objects cannot be created from editing field codes", page.54, "Error! Reference source not found").

This book is very similar, in spirit, to the books of Ramjee Prasad and Van Nee, and Heiskala and Terry. The authors have provided references to their own work, without considering the good works put up by the fellow researchers in OFDM.

Over all, this is one of the pathetic, over-priced books from Kluwer. My recommendation is: don't read it, even if you get this for free.

As the title of this book suggests the authors try to give the reader the essential background knowledge on implementation aspects of an OFDM system.
As usual, the book starts with a short introduction to the propagation model, OFDM transmission and the essential building blocks of such a communication system (e.g. coding).
In fact, most of these description do not go much into detail, rendering these chapters useless for experieced readers.
Even the synchonization and channel estimation, which are the essential components of a receiver are described very sketchy.

Moreover several chapters of this book are presenting the design of a WLAN receiver IC without going into details. There is only little more information than you could get from reading the authors' papers about their simulation system and their receiver ICs. If you expect a book that helps you to get around the problems in OFDM system design, you will be disappointed for sure.

All in all the book is a nice introduction to OFDM, but in no way a "how-to make it work" book. Regarding the content of the book and the low quality of the pictures, a price of 150$ (12/2003) is overpriced.

Reading the few reviews of this book you would either think that it stinks or that it is a gift from the gods. Both ideas would be a bit off the mark. In fact, based on the reviews (and the price) I avoided buying it for a while. Until one day during a course in UCLA with fred j. harris I heard him recommend this book. So I bought it.

Here are the bad things about the book, as I see it:
- The price is ridiculous, but hey we all know the racket that the likes of Kluwer Academic Press run, don't we? Hugely over priced academic books for hardbacks with AWFUL typography. You would think that with all the money they are making from us they would have enough to upgrade their printing systems.
- Yes, the book has a couple of error warnings from whatever text editor they used to write this book.
- Yes, it does not LITERALLY tell you how to make OFDM systems work, but, come on guys are you really that literally minded? This criticism may be true but it speaks more of the reader than of the writer.

And now the good stuff:
- Chapters 3, 6, and 7, are worth the price of the book (particularly 6 and 7).
- Chapter 6 on synchronization gives a very good systems view of OFDM. Anybody working on the implementation of OFDM-based real-time systems would profit from it.
- Similarly Chapter 7 on the impact of front-end effects is very good for somebody working on development.

If you are looking for a book to help you with your research topic in school this is not the book for you. But, if you are a DSP or Systems engineer working on the development of a real-time OFDM/OFDMA system, I can assure you that you will appreciate this book at least for the chapters I mentioned.

"This book...gives a comprehensive overview of the implementation of OFDM systems. It capitalizes on the large experience of the authors with the implementation of OFDM base WLAN system. For those who study or work on broadband communication in a wireless multipath environment, this book is a useful and easy-to-read reference monogram." Zongsen Wu, Shaowen Song and Tianying Ji , Physics and Computing Dept., Wilfrid Laurier University , ON