Architectures of Next Generation Wireless Networks
Emerging Internet Quality of Service (QoS) mechanisms are expected to enable wide spread use of real time services such as VoIP and videoconferencing. The “best effort” Internet delivery cannot be used for the new multimedia applications. New technologies and new standards are necessary to offer Quality of Service for these multimedia applications. Therefore new communication architectures integrate mechanisms allowing guaranteed QoS services as well as high rate communications. The service level agreement with a mobile Internet user is hard to satisfy, since there may not be enough resources available in some parts of the network the mobile user is moving into. The emerging Internet QoS architectures, differentiated services and integrated services, do not consider user mobility. QoS mechanisms enforce a differentiated sharing of bandwidth among services and users. Thus, there must be mechanisms available to identify traffic flows with different QoS parameters, and to make it possible to charge the users based on requested quality. The integration of fixed and mobile wireless access into IP networks presents a cost effective and efficient way to provide seamless end-to-end connectivity and ubiquitous access in a market where the demand for mobile Internet services has grown rapidly and predicted to generate billions of dollars in revenue.