In future wireless and mobile environments it is likely that mobile stations will be able to choose between multiple access networks offering competing services. Wireless 4G network should offer a wide use of information processing techniques, efficient manipulation of the network resources, and reuse of network functions. It should also allow the insertion of supplementary capacities making it easy to add services. In this article, first we study the design of intelligent services in wireless fourth generation networks. Then, we propose several intelligent network functionalities to determine the best network to use efficiently. Finally, we study the effect of the intelligent functions on the network performance using simulation analysis.
The evolution of wireless network technologies has led to different generations of wireless cellular systems referred as nG (1G, 2G, 2.5G, 3G,…). Current wireless systems only provide limited services. For instance, 2G, 2.5G users are asking for communication services at the wire line quality (both voice, data, multimedia) when they are mobile. A very high-data rate is required to realize this and this data rate is well beyond the capability of the third generation (3G) wireless systems. This is the motivation behind the increasing research thrust on defining and designing wireless fourth generation (4G) networks [1], [2] and [3]. The vision for 4G and beyond systems is towards unification of various mobile and wireless networks. However, there is a fundamental difference between wireless cellular and wireless data networks, such as WLANs. The difference is that cellular systems are commonly circuit-switched, meaning that for a certain call, a connection establishment has to take place prior to the call. On the contrary, wireless data networks are of packet-switched nature [4].
Fourth generation wireless networks will be a heterogeneous network consisting of different access networks, which may overlap with one another. In this environment, a mobile station is equipped with a mobile device containing multiple wireless interfaces or a multi-mode interface. It will enhance and extend mobility: anytime and anywhere accessibility, IP mobility, privacy and security of communications, diversity of services while keeping low cost. The wireless 4G networks are expected to include wireless access, wireless mobile, wireless LANs PANs, and satellite networks and to provide a wide range of services including high-speed data and real-time multimedia to mobile users. The mobile user is expected to be able to communicate through different wireless networking architectures and to roam within these architectures.
The wireless 4G networks will envision flexible and adaptive integration of network technologies to enable mobile node to seamlessly roam between access networks [1] and [2]. These networks should not only provide the commonly known Internet services, but also should transport the traditional voice service and other real-time applications. Eventually, they should allow more advanced broadband multimedia services with varying QoS requirements (e.g., preferred low delay, limited jitter, high throughput, or high peak packet rate). Mobility management, including, handoff, best network selection, and location management, allow multimedia applications to get certain quality guarantee on bandwidth, jitter and delay for its packets delivery [5], [6], [7], [8], [9], [10], [11], [12], [13] and [14].
Wireless 4G networks will not only help improving existing services [5] and [6] but integrate intelligent algorithms for mobility management, resource management, access control, routing, etc. They will offer a wide use of information processing techniques, an efficient manipulation of the network resources, and reuse of network functions. They should allow the insertion of supplementary capacities making it easy to add services.
In public telephone networks, the experience realized with the integration of intelligent services has shown its advantages and success. The situation is now taking place with wireless second and third generation networks [6]. Complementary services make the management of the wireless 4G networks easier, and provide flexible access to multimedia applications. To the best of our knowledge, very few works have dealt with wireless intelligent networks. The Third Generation Partenership Project 2 (3GPP2) [6] has started taking interest in intelligent network in wireless networks. It has just focused on defining the wireless intelligent network architecture in terms of functional entities.
Our contribution in this article is 2-fold. First, we define an architecture for heterogeneous Wireless 4G networks that makes the composing access networks transparent to users and provides seamless services. Second, we propose the introduction of complementary services and intelligent network functionalities, such as best network selection, handoff and location management, in wireless fourth generation, showing their effects and behaviors.
The remaining part of this article is organized as follows. Section 2 describes the wireless 4G, requirements and characteristics. Section 3 introduces some complementary services. Section 4 gives the design of some services that we find useful for multiple advanced applications. Section 5 describes and analyzes the performance results obtained from the simulation analysis. Finally, the conclusion is presented in Section 6.
In this article, we have proposed method to integrate intelligent services in wireless fourth generation and intelligent algorithms for the UMS to determine the best network to use and in a way to use resources efficiently. Then, we have studied the effect of these intelligent functionalities on the network performance using simulation analysis. The numerical results developed in this article show that the intelligent services improve the satisfied requests rate, the signaling overhead, the bandwidth utilization rate, the handoff blocking probability and the packets loss rate.
Our paper did not address the impact of enhanced mobile terminals of the performance of 4G systems. Multimode terminals, for example, help achieving better provision of QoS and support multiple air interface technologies [17].
