Multiple Access Communications

It is our great pleasure to present the proceedings of the Third International Workshop on Multiple Access Communications (MACOM) that was held in Barcelona during September 13-14, 2010. In 1961, Claude Shannon established the foundation for the discipline now known as "multi-user information theory" in his pioneering paper "Two-way Communication Channels," and later Norman Abramson published his paper "The Aloha System—Another Alternative for Computer Communications" in 1970 which introduced the concept of multiple access using a shared common channel. Thereafter, for more than 40 years of study, numerous elegant theories and algorithms have been developed for multiple-access communications. During the 1980s and 1990s the evolution of multiple-access techniques p- ceeded in conjunction with the evolution of wireless networks. Novel multiple access techniques like code division multiple access (CDMA) and orthogonal frequency division multiple access (OFDMA) provided increased spectral - ?ciency, dynamicity and ?exibility in radio resource allocation with intrinsic anti-multipath and anti-interference features. In this ?rst decade of the 21st century,multiple-accesstechniques,derivedfromadvancedwirelesstransmission methodologiesbasedonthediversityconcept(e. g. ,MC-CDMA,MIMO-OFDMA and SC-FDMA), opened the road to a renewed idea of multiple access. Today multiple-access communications involve many challenging aspects not only l- ited (like in the past) to physical layer design. Medium access control (MAC) techniques play a crucial role in managing the radio resources that users will exploit to transmit their data streams. Recent developments in software radios and cognitive radios have led to a signi?cant impact also on spectrum m- agement and access paradigms.