The rationale behind this textbook is to provide all the necessary mathematical background to facilitate the training and education of students and specialists working in the interrelated fields of signal processing, telecommunications, and networking. Our intention was to create a self-contained textbook that enables mastering both the fundamental results in the areas of signal processing, telecommunications and networking as well as the more advanced results and recent research trends in these areas.
In our collective academic experience, students often begin their graduate education with widely varying undergraduate backgrounds in terms of needed subjects such as probability theory, stochastic processes, statistics, linear algebra, calculus, optimization techniques, game theory, and queueing theory. While some students are well prepared for advanced courses in signal processing, telecommunications, and networking, others are not as well prepared and must make extra remedial efforts. However, obtaining the necessary mathematical background is often difficult because these topics are usually dispersed across a large number of courses, where the emphasis is frequently put on topics different than signal processing, telecommunications, and networking.
We hope that this textbook will serve as a reference for graduate-level students seeking to reach a common standard level of preparedness before undertaking more advanced specialized studies. We believe that this book will also be useful for researchers, engineers, and scientists working in related areas in electrical engineering, computer science, bioinformatics, and system biology. We also believe that this textbook could be used for a one-semester (or two-semester) graduate-level course that will help students acquire all the necessary mathematical background to pursue more advanced graduate courses. Both introductory and more advanced graduate-level courses could be taught based on this textbook. This textbook is accompanied by a Solutions Manual, and a set of viewgraphs will be made available to interested instructors. This textbook could also be used as a reference for self-teaching by a motivated professional who has graduate-level math skills.
Each chapter of this 20-chapter textbook was contributed by different experts in the areas of signal processing, telecommunications, and networking. Collectively, the chapters comprehensively cover a broad range of mathematical techniques that have been found to be necessary for a good understanding and mastering of the concepts and results from the fields of signal processing, telecommunications, and networking. Each chapter includes both mathematical theory as well as examples and homework exercises to illustrate the usage of the various mathematical concepts to solve different applications.
This textbook would not have been possible without the participation and support of contributing authors and our students. Our heartfelt thanks go to our contributing authors, families, PhD student Mr. Ali Riza Ekti, and research associate Dr. Serhan Yarkan, who spent a huge amount of time and effort in compiling, correcting and merging together all the files and contributions. Their help and participation in this project are greatly appreciated. We would also like to thank our students: Amina Noor, Aitzaz Ahmad, and Sabit Ekin for their help. Also, the support from the National Science Foundation (NSF) and Qatar Telecom (Qtel) is appreciated.
Despite our efforts to minimize all sources of errors and misunderstandings, we believe that inconsistencies and errors might show up. Therefore, we are kindly asking our readers to email us their feedback to [email protected]. Any feedback is welcomed to improve this book. This book’s webpage will be maintained at the webpage of Dr. Serpedin at Texas A&M University (TAMU): http://www.ece.tamu.edu/~serpedin/. Viewgraphs, a list of corrections, and additional teaching materials will be posted at this webpage. The instructors interested in adopting this textbook can access the Solutions Manual by contacting CRC Press.