ABSTRACT
Wireless technologies are constantly evolving and have done so for more than two decades, when only considering mobile communications, going from 1G to 4G and soon 5G. This chapter attempts to elaborate on the previous works, based on the results obtained by the European COST IC1004 network of scientific experts, in order to risk a vision on the future challenges and developments in mobile and wireless communications, on a time scale of about 5 years. This is done in the three main “pillars” of the success story of follow-up mobile communications COST Actions, which are antennas and channels, signal processing, and device networking. The impact of antennas “in free-space” on the radio channel characteristics has been thoroughly investigated between 0.7 and 6 GHz, leading to a number of design criteria for a “good antenna array” on a small device and antenna evaluation methods.
