Chapter 13: UMTS Network Evolution

13.1. Introduction

The third generation (3G) of mobile communication systems, to which UMTS belong, is becoming a significant step forward in the convergence of mobile technologies and the Internet. Compared with the 3G, we can imagine the fourth generation providing more bandwidth, better QoS and personalization of services across heterogenous access networks. In the path towards this evolution, the 3 GPP has defined a number of Releases, i.e. a group of technical specifications whose milestones are summarized in Table 13.1.

Table 13.1: Main features of 3GPP Releases within the UMTS system evolution path
	1 ^st version	Main feature enhancements
*Release 99*	March 2000	Basis for most current commercially deployed UMTS networks
*Release 4*	March 2001	Enhancements applied to the CS domain: introduction to the MSC server, Circuit-Switched Media Gateway (CS-MGW) and IP transport of CN protocols Enhancements of UTRAN QoS Introduction to the Transcoder Free Operation (TrFO) concept Definition of low chip rate UTRA/TDD mode (TD-SCDMA)
*Release 5*	March 2002	Enhancements applied to the PS domain: introduction to the IP Multimedia Sub-system Introduction to HSDPA ( High Speed Downlink Packet Access) Enhancements of GERAN so that this can be aligned with the UTRAN Proposal of IP transport in the UTRAN Introduction to the wideband AMR codec (AMR-WB)
*Release 6*	September 2005	Introduction to Multimedia Broadcast/Multicast Services (MBMS) Enhancements to support WLAN interworking Definition of the enhanced uplink dedicated channels (E-DCH) also known as High Speed Uplink Packet Access (HSUPA) Definition of IMS...

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Chapter 13: UMTS Network Evolution

13.1. Introduction

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