IEEE/CIC Special Issue on

Architectures and Models for the B3G & 4G mobile

The number of subscribers for mobile communications has increased much faster than predicted, particularly for terrestrial use. In the year 2000 the number of mobile subscribers was around 400 million worldwide and for the year 2010 more than 1.8 billion mobile subscribers are anticipated.

The majority of traffic is changing from speech-oriented communications to multimedia communications. It is also generally expected that due to the dominating role of mobile wireless access, the number of portable handsets will exceed the number of PCs connected to the Internet. Therefore, mobile terminals will be the major person-machine interface in the future instead of the PC. Due to the dominating role of IP based data traffic in the future the networks and systems have to be designed for economic packet data transfer. The expected new data services are highly bandwidth consuming. This results in higher data rate requirements for future systems.

The major step from the second generation to third generation and further to fourth generation was the ability to support advanced and wideband multimedia services, including e‑mail, file transfers, and distribution services like radio, TV and software provisioning (e.g. software download). These multimedia services can be symmetrical and asymmetrical services, real-time and non real-time services. External market studies have predicted that in Europe in the year 2010 more than 90 million mobile subscribers will use mobile multimedia services and will generate about 60 % of the traffic in terms of transmitted bits. Only in China, the DGI predicted that there will be over 400 million mobile phones in China by year 2008, and over 150 million for multimedia applications.

In the fourth generation mobile communication (4G mobile), the combination and convergence of the different worlds Information Technology (IT) industry, media industry and telecommunications will integrate communication with IT. As a result, mobile communications together with IT will penetrate into the various fields of the society.

In future 4G mobile communications, two economically contradictive demands will arise; ubiquity and diversity. Open, global and ubiquitous communications make people free from spatial and temporal constraints. Versatile communication systems will also be required to realize customized services based on diverse individual needs. The flexibility of mobile IT can satisfy these demands simultaneously. Therefore, mobile IT can be seen to play a key fundamental role in the 21^st century.

The user expectations are increasing with regard to a large variety of services and applications with different degree of quality of service (QoS), which is related to delay, data rate and bit error requirements. Therefore, seamless services and applications via different access systems and technologies that maximize the use of available spectrum will be the driving forces for future developments.

In addition, many types of objects as well as people will have network functions and will communicate with each other through networks. Therefore, different communication relationships such as person to person, machine to machine and mainly machine to person and vice versa, will determine mobile and wireless communications in the future.

Given the increasing demand for flexibility and individuality in society, the mean for the end-user might be assessed. Potentially, the value would be in the diversity of mobile applications, hidden from the complexity of the underlying communications schemes. This complexity would be absorbed into an intelligent personality management mechanism, which would learn and understand the needs of the user, and control the behavior of their reconfigurable and open wireless terminals accordingly in terms of application behavior and access to future support services.

The trends from a service perspective include integration of services and convergence of service delivery mechanisms. In particular, three pillars (triple-C or CCC, since each pillar starts with the letter “C”) can characterize from a service perspective these trends of integration of services and convergence of service delivery mechanisms:

1. Connectivity (provision of a pipe, including intelligence in the network and the terminal).

2. Content (information, including push-pull).

3. Commerce (transactions).

These trends will result in new service delivery dynamics and a new paradigm in telecommunications where value added services such as those which are location dependent will provide enormous benefits to both the end users and the service providers.

The high level vision of the future development of 4G mobile is considered to be as follows:

-        Future development of 4G. The vision for the future development of 4G is that there will be a steady and continuous evolution. For example the current capabilities of some of the terrestrial radio interfaces are already being extended towards 10 Mb/s and it is anticipated that these will be extended even further over the next decade. The vision for the future development of 4G is to raise the down-stream transmission speed (from the base station to a terminal) to about 30 Mb/s by around the year 2005, and up to 100Mb/s after 2010.

-     Future development of 4G in relation with future development of other radio systems. In conjunction with the future development of 4G there may be an inter‑relationship with other radio systems, for example wireless LANs, digital video broadcast, etc.

-        For future 4G systems, there may be a requirement for a new complementary wireless access technology for the terrestrial component, sometime after the year 2010. This will complement the future development of 3G and future development of other radio systems. Present digital cellular systems have evolved by adding more and more system capabilities and enhancements to make them resemble the capabilities of 3G systems. It is anticipated that with 3G there will also be a continuum of enhancements that may render those systems practically indistinguishable from 4G systems, indeed, the user should see a continuous increase in capability. The vision for a potential new radio interface is to support up to 50-100 Mb/s in the mobile environment and up to 1Gb/s in the stationary environment in the down-stream transmission by around the year 2010 .

In the future wireless service provision will be characterized by global mobile access (terminal and personal mobility), high quality of services (full coverage, intelligible, no drop and no/lower call blocking and latency), and easy and simple access to multimedia services for voice, data, message, video, world-wide web, GPS, etc. via one user terminal.

End-to-end secured services will be fully coordinated, via access control, authentication use of biometric sensors and/or smart card and mutual authentication, data integrity and encryption with no intermediate gateway(s) for decryption/re-encryption. User added encryption feature for higher level of security will be part of the system.

The vision for the future development of 4G mobile is that there will be a steady and continuous evolution over the next 10 years. Beyond this timeframe, for future 4G systems, there may be a requirement for a new wireless access technology for the terrestrial component, sometime after 2010.

Considering how second generation systems have evolved by adding more and more system capabilities and enhancements to make them resemble the capabilities of 3G systems; it is possible that with third generation systems there may be a continuum of enhancements that will render those systems practically indistinguishable from future generation systems. Indeed, it is expected that it will be more difficult to identify distinct generation gaps and such a distinction may only be possible by looking back at some point in the future.

The vision from the user perspective can be implemented by integration of these different evolving and emerging access technologies in a common flexible and expandable platform to provide a multiplicity of possibilities for current and future services and applications to users in a single terminal. Systems of 4G mobile will mainly be characterized by a horizontal communication model, where different access technologies as cellular, cordless, WLAN type systems, short range connectivity and wired systems will be combined on a common platform to complement each other in an optimum way for different service requirements and radio environments which in my word called “Converged Broadband Wireless Core, or Open Wireless Architecture”.

In addition to the above technologies, the critical issues for the mobile terminals are:

• New power technology – empower the intelligent mobile applications
• New transceiver technology – improve the receiving and transmitting performance for the future 4G mobile systems
• Open CAI (Common Air Interface) core interfaces – support the re-configurable and software radio architecture

The most important issue in developing this future-proven 4G mobile system is the Architecture. “Without good architecture, we are doing the worst thing (in mobile communications)”.

The architecture of 4G mobile will be based on the converged broadband wireless platform and targeted for open wireless architecture. The open core platform will include:

1. open RF interface architecture
2. open base-band processing interface architecture
3. open core network infrastructure
4. open mobile application protocol

Therefore, this special issue is very timely and valuable for those who are involved in the research of next generation mobile communications.

TOPICS

Contributions are solicited in 4G mobile research and applied areas with focus on architecture and models. These include, but are not limited to, the following feature topics:

• 4G open system architecture
• 4G open services and application architecture
• 4G radio design architecture
• 4G signal processing architecture
• 4G transceiver technology and architecture
• 4G network protocol and signaling
• 4G open wireless core architecture
• 4G common air interface BIOS architecture
• 4G inter-operability and co-existence model
• 4G spectrum sharing and bandwidth allocation model
• 4G network management model
• 4G soft switching architecture
• 4G All-IP architecture
• 4G MIMO architecture
• 4G performance analysis model
• 4G software defined modules
• 4G adaptive modulation and coding architecture

 SUBMISSION INSTRUCTIONS

Submitted papers will be reviewed by referees in accordance with the regular rules of the IEEE and CIC publication. Prospective authors are requested to submit papers together with the full contact information to Prof. Willie LU at: wwlu@ieee.org.  

GUEST EDITORS

Prof. Willie W.LU
Stanford University, USA
E-mail:wwlu@ieee.org
Fax :1-603-590-0637 (USA)

Prof. Xiao-hu You
Southeast University, China

Prof. Ke Gong
Tsinghua University, China

Prof. Jing Wang
Tsinghua University, China

Prof. Bernhard Walke
Aachen University of Technology, Germany

PUBLICATION AND SUBMISSION TIME TABLE

Submission deadline:           March 30, 2004

Acceptance notification:       July 30, 2004

Camera-ready due:              October 30, 2004

Publication:                            2Q 2005