Contrôle d'accès et gestion des réseaux 4G hétérogènes
Artur Hecker, Houda Labiot · HAL (Le Centre pour la Communication Scientifique Directe) · 2005
The future of mobile communications will go far beyond the existing voice and data communications (2G/3G). We pursue the idea of the next generation global telecommunications system providing a highly adaptive and context-aware access to services all over the world. We discuss different problems with the existing wireless and mobile systems and give an argumentation for a heterogeneous, technology-opportunistic, user-centric 4G vision combining the economic and technological advantages of different transmission technologies. We then identify the logical service access control and the associated user and infrastructure management as major challenges and critical issues in this 4G vision. In our vision, service access should be completely operator- and infrastructure-independent, context-adaptive, scalable, rapid and easy-to-manage. In the context of the general logical access problem in heterogeneous systems, we discuss the existing solutions and demonstrate the shortcomings of both the technology-bound low-layer and the overlaid high-layer access architectures. We propose a novel low-layer solution that virtualizes the access control mechanisms without overlaying. We show how this solution can be implemented in our 4G vision. We present an example implementation for 802.11 WLANs. Regarding management, we first study centralized architectures in the 4G scope and propose two classic approaches to the organization of provider networks. We then present our new proposal that applies the peer-to-peer (P2P) paradigm to the control plane. We show the advantages and the open issues with this approach. Finally, we identify open topics and give an outlook to the future research.