Category: Books

O.k. this is a bit out of the ordinary on this blog, but apart computers and networks I’m also interested in spaceflight. Over the weekend I’ve come come across “The Martian” by Andy Weir due to a recommendation of an online ebook store and found it so outstanding that I had to write a few words about it here…

The story is about an astronaut in the near future stranded on Mars after a mission abort has gone horribly wrong and about his quest to survive until he can be picked up. Finally a book about Mars again that is not about astronauts encountering hostile aliens that want to kill them. What stands out is not only the storyline with lots of turns, twists and surprises, but also how closely the story is weaved around NASA’s plans to send humans to Mars and the technology existing and under development. Also, the writing style and the protagonist’s character and humor make this book a page turner. I usually take my time reading books but I went through this in two days (i.e. nights) flat. I just couldn’t put it down, it’s an extraordinary piece of work. 10 thumbs up!

Back in 2001, Glen Moody published the first edition of “Rebel Code”, a book about the early days of Open Source and Free Software in general and about the creation of Linux in particular. It might seem strange to do a book review almost 15 years later but it’s a great historic document telling the story of how things came together in the 1990’s. The first part of the book focuses on the young Linus Torvalds and how the first Linux kernel version made it to the Internet. The second part of the book then looks at how the Linux kernel evolved in the mid 1990’s and its role as the “missing link” in Richard Stallman’s Free Software Foundation that completed the Free Software world for the first time. The third part of the book then looks at how graphical user interfaces, web browsers and end user applications not only for nerds came to the Linux world at the end of the 1990’s. A great read and I can fully recommend it for those who would like to find out more about open source history and do so from a historic point of view. Both print and e-book editions are (still) available so the book is still easy to get.

While I knew some of the stories, the book puts all of them in context and into a bigger picture. In other words, it made a lot of things a lot clearer for me. I’ve been asking myself a lot why Linux was not part of my university life back in the mid 1990s and the book makes it quite clear as well. I have to admit I’m a GUI sort of computer guy and there simply was no usable graphical user interface for Linux before 1998 (sorry, everything before KDE and GNOME was not usable for anything else than showing xterm windows…). In contrast, Windows 3.1 and later versions were on the market since 1991, which is about the time I bought my first IBM compatible PC. In other words until 1998 there was no incentive for me whatsoever to even consider something other than Windows. After university and my first job in a small company I joined Nortel as a programmer and was given an HP Unix machine for software development development with a really ugly Motiv based GUI. Compared to Windows it was stone age and I thought I actually had an old machine. But I know realize that looking at it from a Unix world point of view it was actually state of the art then. That didn’t really encourage me to look into the Linux world, either.

But things kept evolving and KDE and GNOME made a real step forward in the 2000s., i.e. only after the book was already written. In addition, StarOffice, closed source at first, also became open source at some point during that timeframe as well. For me having a usable desktop and a usable office suite in addition to an easy way to install a Linux distribution were the final pieces of the puzzle that had to come into place before I would even think about experimenting with Linux. Replacing Windows was actually not my goal at first when I finally started experimenting with Linux in 2008/9 on a netbook. Agreed, I got to the open source side of things very very late but since then it has been an incredible ride and I quickly realized that everything was in place for me to ditch proprietary and closed source software for good. Just last year I kissed the last Windows box at home good bye and I haven’t looked back since.

So that’s how the book’s story continued for me and I’m happy that I know a lot more now of how things evolved up to the point when I started to discover them. Two thumbs up!

Back in October 2012 I wrote a raving review about ‘Trojan Horse’, a fictional cyber-crime story by Mark Russinovich, one of the very few writers who gets the technical details right. A lot has happened since then and living in a post-Snowden era I was a bit skeptical if I could still enjoy a cyber-crime / cyber-espionage novel. Fortunately, Mark’s latest novel, Rogue Code, is more about cyber-crime than about cyber-espionage as the plot focuses on a heist to steal money from the New York Stock Exchange. Being an engineer I wasn’t really sure if I would enjoy a novel about the NYSE so my skepticism continued. But then I really liked his previous two novels so I decided to go for it. And I wasn’t disappointed! The plot starts a bit slow perhaps but I was quickly hooked again and finally had to read the second half of the novel in one piece. As in his previous books he accurately describes the technology bits and does it in a way that geeks know exactly what he’s talking about while less geeky readers will not be turned-off. Kudos to Mark, Rogue Code is another great book and I’m looking forward to the next one!

Today, I'd quickly like to review a book that has been heavy in my suitcase and bags for quite a while now, 'LTE, the UMTS Long Term Evolution' by Stefania Sesia, Issam Toufik and Matthew Baker. Don't get me wrong, I am happy to bear the extra weight as when it comes to the details of LTE this book is an invaluable resource. And I don't seem to be the only one. Several times, I've seen people at meetings and other occasions pulling out the book to look up some details.

So as the title implies the book is about LTE, and on its massive almost 600 pages it goes into the details of pretty much everything from a description of the overall architecture, over message graphs, right down to the level of Zahdoff-Chu sequences. The book is written in a very easy to understand manner especially for those who already have some experience with how wireless networks work and I think this is part of it's success. It doesn't only repeat what's in the standards but puts lots of explanations around it so one understands much easier why some things have been put into the standards and what they are supposed to do.

If you are looking for a first introduction to LTE in a reasonable amount of time, the book might be a bit too thick. For those of you with a thirst for the details before one has to drift-off into the facts-only based standards, this book is your best companion!

Harri Holma and Antti Toskala have done it again! Already famous in the industry for their bestselling books on UMTS and HSPA they have gone ahead and have published a massive book around the LTE air interface. So if you want to learn the ins and outs of layer 1 to 3 of LTE, the book is an ideal pick. Be warned though, bring massive amounts of time with you, it'll take some time to go through the 400+ pages.

Before picking up a copy it's important to realize that the book focuses primarily on the air interface and not the overall system. Chapter 3 contains an overall system architecture overview but it's too short, has no signaling flows and doesn't put things into perspective to serve as an overall beginner's introduction to LTE.

The book starts to go deep in Chapter 4. OFDMA, SC-FDMA basics are explained and MIMO is also not missing. Chapter 4 focuses on the physical layer and introduces the physical channels and physical layer procedures such as HARQ, timing advance, power control, paging, random access and many other things. The MAC and RLC protocols follow in Chapter 6. Chapter 7 focuses on mobility in idle mode and handovers while being connected. Radio Resource Management is treated in Chapter 8 and performance in Chapter 9. Interested in how many VoIP calls an LTE cell can handle simultaneously? Chapter 10 gives an exhausting answer.

Chapter 11 then focuses on performance and the challenges involved in developing front-end and baseband components for base stations and mobile devices. MIPS are out, GIPS are in and digital interfaces between the front-end and the baseband components need to shuffle data backwards and forwards at speeds well beyond 1 GBit/s. Chapter 12 then focuses on LTE TDD mode for China and the final pages of the book are dedicated to the evolution of HSPA and how that compares to LTE.

All in all, a great book with lots of air interface details. I wouldn't recommended it for the beginner who wants to learn about LTE but rather for those in the industry needing a solid introduction of how the LTE air interface works. Kudos to the authors, I've learnt a lot!

Here's a link to Amazon where you can check out the table of contents and read some sample pages.

It seems my blog is one of the few places on the web where you can find reviews on books about wireless technology. So today, I want to continue with a great book from Moray Rumney about "LTE and the Evolution to 4G Wireless".

I've known Moray for a while now and his down to earth view on where the wireless industry is moving, or rather to where it should be moving, have had an impact on my own thinking over time and I am very grateful for that. Therefore I am especially pleased that Moray has completed his work on the book.

The book title already tells a lot of what the book is about and after a long bus ride through the English countryside and a couple of plane trips I am now halfway through and have learnt so much already that it is difficult to put it down. Expect a couple of blog posts on some very technical topics based on what I have found in the book soon.

In the first part of the book a solid introduction is given on LTE starting with the ideas behind the air interface, the new physical layer including a close look at the physics behind it, the channel structure, radio resource signaling, higher layer signaling, the new core network, etc. etc. Very impressive and much much more readable than the standard documents! For those with appetite for more, each chapter lists the standard documents it is based on. Invaluable pointers!

The second part of the book then focuses on design and verification challenges and conformance testing. I have to admit my knowledge about the physical layer does not go much farther than understanding the basic concepts so I always wondered how first mobiles and base stations can be developed without each other and tested against the standard. So even though the second part of the book is though for me to read due to my limited knowledge in that domain it is nevertheless very worthwhile as my understanding and feeling for the technology grows with every page.

The final chapter of the book then discusses LTE-Advanced and the potential improvements that could be made on LTE, a system that is not yet even rolled out. Beyond only listing potential areas of work, Moray also explains where the difficulties and pitfalls lie in extending a system that already pushes the limits quite far today.

With all the details included in the book it's difficult to do it alone. The co-author lists is the most extensive I have seen so far, it's over 30 names and short-bios. So expect ultra-precise knowledge on each topic!

By now it's probably obvious that I can fully recommend the book. In case you give it a go, have fun reading it!

Wireless Broadband – Conflict and Convergence. Sounds interesting, I decided, so I got a copy, not the least also because I know the work of Vern Fotheringham's co-author, Chetan Sharma, which I find very interesting and I have quoted him in my recent book.

Everybody always says the telecommunications market in the US is different from the rest of the world and this book explains why. The authors first go a bit back in time to explain how the telecommunications act of 1996 was designed to introduce competition in the US telcom market. 12 years later, the authors contest an utter failure of the policy, with AT&T and the baby Bells back in control both of the fixed line telephony, DSL and wireless sectors with little hope for change on the horizon. It's very interesting to follow the twists and turns and to compare it to what happened in other countries in which similar regulation attempts have been undertaken, sometimes with more, sometimes with less success.

It's a bit of a shortcoming of the book that the authors have not undertaken this, since similar decisions have been taken elsewhere, often with more success due to fine tuning over the years or by using a different approach to regulation altogether. Also, in my opinion, the book is a bit too optimistic on the influence WiMAX will have on the overall competitive situation. In today's world, where it is not enough to be a powerful player in only a single country, even with 300 million people, I have my doubts if the single nationwide WiMAX provider in the US can really make a difference, with wireless devices not optimized for voice and produced only for a relatively small audience. While GSM and CDMA based networks in the US share the later problem, they still have a big advantage with their inherent voice capability. Well, time will tell.

So no matter if you live in the US or somewhere else and would like to know why the telecommunication sector in the US is what it is today and how it could potentially evolve in the future, this book is definitely for you!

I've known Tomi Ahonen for quite a while now and I've met him at conferences before and I am a regular reader of his Communities Dominates Brands blog. Up to this point, however, I haven't read a single one of his books so far, due to mostly being busy on my own writing or other activities. It was time to change that so I ordered a copy of "Mobile as the 7th of the Mass Media" as I've seen bits and pieces of it over the years on his blog and as I quoted one of his blog articles on the topic in my recent book.

I was not sure how fast I would get through with it, being a 300+ page book but I made it in less than a week, as Tomi's writing style is entertaining, his facts solid and the material top notch. Most of the material can be found on his blog, too, but the point of the book is that all the material has been put together in a single place so one thing leads to another and ideas can be built upon each other, something that is not so simple when writing a blog.

Tomi has many examples of exciting mobile services from many different countries ranging from Blyk inthe UK for mobile advertising to young people to mobile social networking in Japan and Korea. At one point I was thinking that if all the things he describes would come together in a single country, it would indeed be a very different world from now. But all the things exist today and they will go around the world and be adopted step by step.

Some thoughts I found particularly useful:

• SMS: My thinking on SMS has changed. I did indeed see it a bit as the tiny brother of the e-mail, but as Tomi points out the mobile and instantaneous nature of it makes it quite different to the e-mail. And as far as the limit of 160 characters is concerned, it's not really a limit for the main target group, as I've recently discovered myself with Twitter.

• Mobile Payment: Very differently handled from country to country, see my recent experiences in Austria. As a frequent traveler I'd really like to see a common approach but I guess that is unlikely to happen.

• Why America is behind in mobile: Very good analysis of the issues and I fully agree on the impact side with the major thing being the incoming call charges. While Tomi sees the the variety of different network technologies not as one of the core issues for the problems, I personally do, I probably have a bit of a different angle on it. Maybe a thing for a separate post. One can't agree on everything 🙂

• Battle for the Pocket: Tomi argues the mobile phone is taking over more and more things that have so far been done with separate devices. Not only that but by including it into mobile phones things get cheaper and the quantities change significantly.

• Generation-C, aka the community generation: Yes, when I look at kids today in the metro, etc., I see them texting 3 words in a message and it is less a message than a dialogue. While people like us would abstain from doing that because it's a waste of money to send 3 words for the price of 10 or 20 cents, kids think in a different way. And you or me are not going to change this 🙂

• 18 month replacement cycle: Mobile hardware evolves faster than the PC because it is replaced more often. True, I get a new mobile phone roughly every 18 months and the notebook I am typing this on is already over three years old. If I look at the mobile I had three years ago… No, I don't want that anymore, while my notebook still compares well to today's models.

• And of course, the mobile internet is not the small dumb brother of the desktop Internet: Fully agree, lots more can be made with the Internet when embracing mobility, location, built-in payment, we are only at the beginning of this. One of the things I regularly do is consult Wikipedia when sightseeing to go beyond what is in the tourist guide. And that just exploits one aspect, mobility. I am looking forward when I don't have to type in the name of the sight but the phone/application figures it out by itself from my current GPS coordinates and offers me an overview of sights nearby with a deep dive link to Wikipedia. I could go on but Tomi has more space in his book, so I leave it to him 🙂

By now I think you get the point: If you are interested in the social and economical changes mobiles brought and bring about then this is the book for you.