This book explores the future of mobile communications networks given the increasing demands for services and higher quality, as well as continued growth in the cellular mobile marketplace.
Inspec keywords: application program interfaces; 3G mobile communication; telecommunication engineering education; voice communication; Internet; open systems; multimedia communication; telecommunication standards
Other keywords: personal communications; research initiative; Internet multimedia; voice communication; virtual centre of excellence; future mobile network; UMTS; 3G service control; mobile standards; OSA; application programming interface; 3G mobile communication; multimedia architecture; open systems access; API; virtual university; GSM
Subjects: Education and training; Mobile radio systems; Multimedia communications; Computer communications
The Virtual University Research Initiative (VURI) on Mobility is a corporately funded research project, which has looked at a wide range of topics and issues in the mobile radio and mobility area over several years. Although it has included other universities over this period, its success can be attributed to BT's long-term relationship with three UK universities - Birmingham, Bristol and Oxford. This relationship has provided a reservoir of skills and expertise, which have remained reasonably consistent throughout considerable changes in BT's research and development objectives in the mobility area. The project has had a number of BT managers, and been associated with several different research and development units. This chapter will chart this relationship and its benefit to the business as well as looking at the future significance and direction of the VURI.
The Virtual Centre of Excellence in Mobile and Personal Communications - Mobile VCE - is now some four years old. Through the Mobile VCE, BT has access to a wide range of academic expertise which it is able to use to focus on the challenges of taking mobile technology to the next level, without having any overlap with its other activities, such as 3G standards work, and the VURI. The Mobile VCE has also developed a wide patent portfolio, to which BT has royally-free access.
The technology offered by 3G will enable products to offer much more than just mobile access to the Internet. Network operators and application providers need to exploit the features of 3G networks which add value and enable revenue to be gained from applications and service provision in addition to conveyance. These components and others, accessible via open interfaces, will be available to a large community of application developers. It is vital that this pool of innovation is encouraged and exploited in order to develop the market for 3G products and generate revenue for all parts of the value chain.
The importance of standardisation to the mobile industry is probably best illustrated by the impact of the work on the second generation mobile systems, in particular the GSM (Global System for Mobile Communications) standard. The work was started in the mid-1980s, at about the same time as the launch of commercial first generation cellular networks. A variety of different first generation systems were deployed across Europe and the rest of the world. Network infrastructure and mobile terminals were relatively expensive and market adoption was mainly limited to business users. The objective of GSM standardisation was to create a new pan European system, where users could continue to get service when roaming across country borders. Economies of scale of larger production volumes were expected to reduce prices.
This chapter has shown how operators can move from legacy GSM/GPRS networks towards initial launch of UMTS networks and then on to reach the real 'all-IP' solution of 'IM' and the feature-rich user opportunity that this offers. Operators will see benefits from the cost and capability optimisations in the circuit-switched area as well as the service migration path towards IP-based voice and multimedia applications. As the race to gain UMTS licences and to roll out networks gains speed, and as operators move from launch phase to consolidation it is obvious that the evolving UMTS architecture will give operators the platform to broaden out the service capability to users. This will not only provide higher speed access to data/Internet services but also create an environment to deliver services which are a long way away from the current simple telephony services we experience and use today. In reality, these new features cannot be created by a 'big bang' approach and some of the limitations of legacy systems must be taken into account when providing the complete package for users. This will ensure that while users can access the feature rich capabilities offered by IM, they still get usable and meaningful capability when served by legacy networks.
This chapter initially provides an overview of how a voice telephony service is supported by a UMTS network conforming to the 3GPP Release 1999 standards. It then describes how the subsequent 3GPP Release 4 standards allow for the Internet protocol to be used as a bearer service for voice. The chapter then goes on to describe the proposed solution currently being standardised by 3 GPP for Internet multimedia services (including voice), known as the Release 5 standards. This solution is illustrated with message sequence flows to show the dynamic aspects of the solution and the application of the various protocols. It is assumed that the reader already has an awareness of GSM and general packet radio service (GPRS) networks.
Service control is about controlling network resources to provide services in real time. This chapter concentrates on the opportunities for service control in future mobile, third generation (3G) networks. In particular, the focus is on the all-IP network, defined by the 3G Partnership Project (3GPP) as the Release 4/5 network.
3GPP was conceived some two to three years ago with the express purpose of accelerating work on mobility. Existing standards organisations such as the ITU-T and ETSI had been successful in producing a vast array of international standards for different technologies; however, the speed with which this was attained was slow, especially when compared to bodies such as the IETF. It therefore remained a target of the mobile industry to produce coherent specifications in a time frame that was ahead of those within the standards industry - hence the formation of 3GPP. At the end of 1998 and the beginning of 1999 3GPP formed a group known as OSA, Open Service Access. The purpose of this group was to focus 3GPP's efforts on defining an architecture in support of the virtual home environment (VHE) - the need here being to provide mobile users with access to their service offerings irrespective of their position within or outside the home network environment.
The future developments of the mobility portal must embrace the entire range of existing Web-based content if it is to succeed as the default method of access to the network. This will include all applications from gaming to mobile commerce. Services should be designed so that the relevant elements of a service are available over the appropriate client device, the requirement being that the network recognises the device capability and network connection characteristics. There will not be a single 'killer application' for the mobile device although its unique attributes including location positioning and personal nature provide an opportunity for the mobile device to become the portal through which the user interacts while 'on the move'. It is highly likely that WAP will be superseded within the next 3-5 years by the evolution of existing Internet standards; the requirement for legacy support will remain for WAP-enabled mobile telephone devices.
There are now more mobile telephones in the UK than fixed lines and the number of PDAs is increasing rapidly. Customers buy a telephone for the looks or the features and often do not care who the operator is. Mobile devices are the gateway to all telecommunications networks and services and can consequently be used to increase customers and therefore generate revenue for a network operator. With so many services and applications being promised for 3rd generation (3G) networks, operators now face the challenge both of installing the network capability and of procuring terminal devices that aim to match at least some of these expectations.
As the operators and mobile users prepare for the launch of the first UMTS networks, the industry is already preparing to improve the capabilities of the proposed systems. These enhancements will manifest themselves in various forms, including increased data rates, capacity, quality of service, functionality, etc. This chapter has introduced some of these developments, some of which are just around the corner, others beyond the horizon. Some may fall by the wayside, others are still waiting to be developed. What is important is that there is still room for improvement. As our dependence on mobile communications grows, the demands on the systems will continue to increase, and what seem like unnecessary or unachievable capabilities today will be taken for granted in a few years' time.
This chapter has presented an approach for mobile enhanced domain-based routing that treats fixed and mobile-terminating traffic in an integrated fashion. It has the obvious advantage that many IP features designed for the fixed network will also work for mobile hosts. For example, the approach is amenable to traffic engineering above and cleanly separated from the routing function. By avoiding the use of long term tunnelling, separate flows terminating at a mobile are visible and may be handled separately according to their traffic classes as part of a diffserv-based quality-of-service architecture. The approach also has the potential to replace or obviate the need for many layer-2 mobility signalling technologies, as well as to replace some existing IP routing protocols in fixed domains. The work is now maturing with significant contributions being generated into the IETF, but simulation studies are now required for 3G topologies and traffic patterns. This concept combines three previously separate technology spaces - fixed routing, cellular mobility and MANET routing - and identifies a very promising direction for this fusion.
There are still major areas that need to come together in order to make the real service happen. By far the most significant of these is the terminal device. Manufacturers have very difficult product line decisions in front of them as each sector requires a different terminal which has highly complex protocols and implementation issues within it - it is not cheap to make a small number of terminals and therefore mass-market production is the only way forward. So we may well see the terminal manufacturers create both highly successful winners as well as very disappointing public failures. The costs could be large enough to break the manufacturer and it may well be that only a few survive who then go on to create a family of devices with user interfaces which become as familiar as MS Windows on your PC. Devices need to range from affordable communicators for mass markets like 'pre-pay', through to highly capable portable personal computers for those with specific needs. However, we will see for some years to come a continual revolution in terminal devices as large-scale integration of devices means fitting more functions into smaller spaces. In some of the demonstrations the line '.....data wave goes wireless.....' is used and the experiences that the user will have with the new system and devices are itemised. The trials work has highlighted the opportunity and the items that still require development in order to make this happen. Currently the network capability and the 'all-integrating technology' IP are being put in place - there is therefore nothing to prevent this opportunity being seized and the world of which we have so easily talked being created.
Although PMR has a lower profile than its public cellular counterpart, it is used widely for mobile business communications, by an increasing number of users requiring specialised mobile radio solutions and is the technology of choice for process workers. The TETRA PMR radio standard offers unique PMR functionality and performance, and is the radio technology adopted for supply of a public safety service to the UK police and other emergency organisations.
