Network

The 6th Framework Programme for Research and Technological Development founded by the European Commission has set as its strategic objective “Mobile and Wireless Systems Beyond 3G.” Within that program the Daidalos Integrated Project is designing a next-generation all-IP based system in which users are always connected using heterogeneous access technologies. The project consortium, a set of 37 partners representing telecom operators, industry, and academia, aims to find a prospective path toward deployment of a communications infrastructure for personalized, context-aware composite service delivery to mobile users. The work, scheduled for 2006–2009, is supposed to provide a framework that addresses evolution of the roles of operators, service providers, and customers in an increasingly dynamic and fragmented business and service environment.

The next-generation network (NGN) should be perceived as a composite of autonomous domains that intersect to cooperate based on dynamic service level agreements. Daidalos project addresses interoperator federations horizontally and vertically. Horizontal federations develop between access network providers, between service providers, or between pervasive operators. Vertical federations are established between mixed combinations of wireless access network providers, operators, or service providers, as well as pervasive service providers.

Traditional network architectures do not attempt to infer user needs from a user’s environmental context. In the Daidalos system, services are assumed to be adaptable to network conditions and reconfigurable. Bringing the user into focus encompasses user-controlled service customization and automated service adaptation. The project integrates mechanisms for service personalization and context awareness. This is one step further than the IP multimedia subsystem (IMS), which currently only considers rich presence and basic personalization. A subsystem called the service provisioning platform (SPP) incorporates a modular and extensible toolbox for fragmented models and federations, and allows different entities from different domains to interact.

Separation of the local and global mobility management domains paves the way to better support for federations. Mobility has been further enhanced by inclusion of both terminal and network initiated handovers. Key innovations include decoupling of a user from a mobile terminal at the system level through the virtual identity (VID); increased independence of network access technology by means of a generic abstraction layer; and selection of the preferred network attachment based on inputs provided by network discovery functions, network interfaces, user preferences, current networking context, and operator policies in different access technologies and domains. In such a structured mobile environment, Daidalos integrates negotiation and management of network resources for legacy and multimedia services in the local mobility domain.

One of the key issues on Beyond-3G network is ubiquity . Ubiquitous access to services is synonymous with universal availability of a service, regardless of network technology, mobile device, service type, or user location. User movement, or other context changes, can trigger service reconfiguration. For this purpose, context engines for collecting and processing relevant information from the network infrastructure and terminal sensors are introduced to feed relevant data to pervasive applications.