Telecommunication Systems for the New Millennium
Recent advances in computer and communication technologies have moved telecommunication systems into new applications and trends. Enabling technologies such as Asynchronous Transfer Mode (ATM), Broadband Integrated Services Digital Networks (BISDN), multimedia coding and compression schemes, protocol engineering, Internet and internetworking, wireless and mobile communications, Synchronous Digital Hierarchy (SDH) and optical networking, highde"nition television, video teleconferencing, videophony, video on demand (VoD), video coding, satellite networks, performance evaluation techniques, amongst others, have played a major role in the rapid progress and advances in telecommunications. The Internet has revolutionized the applications and services provided by telecommunication systems. It has shown the importance and signi"cance of telecommunication systems for science, business, commerce, economy, developments, health, education, entertainment, telelearning, and digital library, etc. The USA has started the initial design and implementation of the next generation internet, NGI (see http://www.ngi.gov) and Internet 2 (see http://internet2.edu). These initiatives involve collaboration from federal agencies, academia and industry. They promise a future Internet with a backbone bandwidth in excess of 10 Gb/s, hundreds of gigabit point-of-presence (GigaPOPs), and mechanisms to ensure good quality of service (QoS) and performance. A new generation of wireless for wireless systems is being designed which can provide connectionless packet access to the Internet at data rates in excess of 25 Mb/s. We are witnessing a global information revolution brought by the evolution and progress in digital technology. The enormous progress in digital technology and its applications have changed the ways in which information is generated, processed, transported and stored. The resulting telecommunication, computer and information infrastructure will produce profound changes in all aspects of our day to day life. Furthermore, it will have social and economic impacts. Telecommunication systems, as the arteries of this sophisticated infrastructure, are evolving in response to the complex and stringent requirements of such a new environment. This rapidly evolving infrastructure will play a critical and signi"cant role in realizing the &global village' concept of our world.
Advances in high-performance computers/computing and telecommunications have revolutionized many aspects of our life and have moved many technologies to the mainstream. The next millennium will mark the introduction of new technologies, and advances in the already existing technologies as well as new applications and services. Speed, quality of service and performance of the current telecommunication systems have increased and improved signi"cantly during the current decade. Many enabling technologies have contributed to such an outstanding progress. Amongst these is computer technology. Computing power in the last decade has gone through enormous change in the high-performance arena. The computing paradigm shift has resulted in a performance improvement by a factor of a thousand. There are now