Ambient Networks: A Framework for Future Wireless Internetworking

Abstract

-An increasingly wireless world faces new challenges due to the dynamicity of interactions, range of applications, multitude of available radio access technologies and network functionality. The Ambient Networks project recognizes these trends and enables the creation of innovative network solutions for mobile and wireless systems beyond 3G. These networks will enable scalable and affordable wireless networking while providing pervasive, rich and easy-to-use communication. A specific focus lies on enabling advanced capabilities in environments with increased competition as well as cooperation, environments that are populated by a multitude of user devices, wireless technologies, network operators and business actors. The project adopts a modular architecture that enables plug-and-play control extensibility that supports a wide range of different applications and network technologies. Based on a small subset of common functionality, this approach supports the dynamic deployment of advanced internetworking capabilities, such as media-and contextawareness or multi-radio access.

Common radio resource management for access selection in multi-access networks

“…Among these, the Ambient Networks project, a part of the FP6, is in the most advanced stage. It has developed a generic multi-radio access architecture [1] and a conceptual framework for access selection and resource allocation by joint radio resource management across different RATs [2].…”

“…The details are as follows. 1. Every base station reports its load information to CRRM, and CRRM computes utility value for each cell.…”

Trigger Management Mechanisms

“…ANISI is an information service infrastructure designed to provide services and applications at different layers of the protocol stack with support for network information gathering, correlation and intelligent decision-making in support of enhanced mobility management and context-aware communications. The Ambient Networks architecture [14], [15] capitalizes on the availability of a TMM implementation (i.e. TRG) to collect triggering events from sources within an Ambient Network Node (ANN) and the Ambient Network (AN) as well, classifying and filtering them according to dynamically defined classification rules.…”

Multi-radio resource management for ambient networks

“…For this, a standard interface needs to be specified between the MRRM and other functions in the MRA architecture, see [6] for more details on interfaces.…”

“…However, this research has considered only partial issues towards full network collaboration at the radio access level. In order for this dynamic concept to become a reality, a generic multi-radio access (MRA) architecture [6] has been outlined, which should not only be able to handle several RATs, but also provide for the aforementioned novel ambient networking principles. This paper proposes a consistent framework for access selection and resource allocation by joint Figure 1.…”