The International Symposium on Personal, Indoor and Mobile Radio Communications (PIMRC) is an annual academic conference in the wireless research arena organised by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers' Communications Society. This event has emerged as one of the Communications Society flagship conferences in telecommunications with a long history of bringing together academia, industry and regulatory bodies.
The conference grew out of a workshop on mobile communication organised by the London branch of the Society at King's College, University of London, in 1989. The first PIMRC convened, as an international symposium, at King’s College, University of London in 1991 with fewer than 200 attendees. The first occurrence of the PIMRC in North America was in 1992 at Boston’s Westin Hotel and it attracted 500 attendees, paving the way for the symposium to become one of the flagship wireless events for the IEEE Communications Society. The conference was formed in early 1990s, when new competing medium access technologies were being examined for the exponentially growing cellular telephone market and innovative WLAN transmission technologies were emerging for high speed wireless local area networking (WLAN). This situation made this event an important forum facilitating the growth of the industry to the extent that the symposium hosted the first technical presentation of CDMA cellular networking technology by Qualcomm in PIMRC’91 and the first appearance of researchers in WLAN and mobile wireless data communication services in PIMRC’92.
The chronology of the event from its inception is: