Guest editorial special issue on 2002 European Conference on Wireless Technology

The European Conference on Wireless Technology is a joint initiative of the European Microwave Association (EuMA) together with the IEEE MTT Society. This collaboration, which focuses on the area of wireless technology, started in 1998 at the first European Microwave Week held in Amsterdam, The Netherlands; the name ECWT was adopted at the 2000 EuMW in Paris, France. The ECWT is an integral part of the European Microwave Week; it emphasizes the RF and microwave aspects of wireless communications, encompassing system design, antennas, propagation, analogue and digital processing techniques and high-frequency circuits for wireless systems. ECWT also includes application-specific integrated circuits and modules. Referring to the contents of this special issue, the extended ECWT publications capture a broad range of academic and industrial research work in wireless communications from some of the outstanding European research groups in this field. The topics covered range from methods of propagation evaluation to diversity considerations; from DOA estimation to the handling of mixed traffic for UMTS; from high-speed mobile applications to code sectoring methods; and from error-correcting codes related to ultrawideband signaling to the challenges of signal processing algorithms for 3G and beyond.