Future Mobile Networks: 3G and Beyond
A valuable resource which presents technological advances and market expectations to those in the mobile communications field.
TABLE OF CONTENTS Future Mobile Networks: 3G and Beyond
Chapter 5: GSM to UMTS Architecture Evolution to Support Multimedia
N C Lobley
5.1 Introduction
The growth of mobile communications has been phenomenal with mobile penetration of predominantly voice terminals reaching significant levels within many countries. The Internet and the growth in data traffic within networks has also created additional growth within wired telecommunications networks. As networks aim towards their ultimate capacity, it is clear that the future traffic growth area lies with data applications. Although voice will remain the main application, users will, nevertheless, expect significant additional information delivery capability from their terminals irrespective of whether they are fixed or mobile. This chapter explains how the next generation of mobile (UMTS) can be launched and then carries on to propose how the networks can be evolved to deliver the voice and data applications based upon IP technologies.
5.1.1 The Starting Point
The allocation in the early 1990s of spectrum for third generation mobile really spurred on the technology solutions to deliver higher bit rate communications in the mobile arena which had been restricted previously to low-rate voice and simple (<10 kbit/s) circuit-switched data. A variety of drivers and enabling technologies were tabled to provide the high-bandwidth network capabilities to support the greater bandwidths expected from the advanced third generation radio technologies. The proposals included the use of B-ISDN based techniques with ATM, use of pure N-ISDN technology from both wired and wireless networks, along with enhancements of the GSM architecture.
5.1.2 The Conceptual Architecture
The issue of incorporating new radio technology has been a significant one for operators who...
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