Any Network Any Terminal Anywhere Andreas Fasbender and

Any Network, Any Terminal, Anywhere Andreas Fasbender and Frank Reichert Ericsson Reasearch Eckhard Geulen, Johan Hjelm

Introduction In 3 to 5 years, 20 to 50 percent of all Internet nodes may be wireless Networks using IP technology with Qo. S negotiation capabilities for different services class will slowly replace traditional circuit-switched voice networks

Introduction The wireless technologies will provide global coverage offering : n n A few hundred kb/s on a wide-area level A few Mb/s within locally restricted island Future mobile-aware services will : n n Create an added value for mobile users Open completely new possibilities for network operators, ISPs, and 3 th-party service providers

Mobile Applications and Terminals Accessing e-mail and messaging system is convenient Web access is less attractive because : n n n Bandwidth limitations Delay constraints of today’s cellular network Prices for long Web sessions are prohibitive for end-user

Mobile Applications and Terminals With the rise of packet-oriented cellular networks combined with low price indoor networks, users will be able to stay online as long as they wish The operator will be able to offer service profiles to adjust to user needs, to develop better services, and to raise revenue

Mobile Terminals The mobile market has changed dramatically within the past 10 years A variety of smart-phones and personal digital assistants(PDAs) have appeared on the market—provide both computing and communication capabilities

Mobile Terminals Mobile devices have inherent restrictions with respect to their : n n Man-machine interfaces On-board memory Battery Processing capabilities

Typical device capabilities

Mobile Applications All OS for handhelds now provide a TCP/IP protocol stack allowing application to access suitable access network Many popular applications have hundreds of features—need to extend research in mobile man-machine- interface

Advanced Mobile Systems Give some impressions on how nextgeneration networks should take shape with respect to service provisioning facilities and APIs Design Requirements The ACTS On. The. Move Prototype

Design Requirements Network Independence Transport Optimization Terminal Independence Applications Support Services Application Programming Interface

Network Independence Services must be available to end users irrespective of the current access network Circuit-switched network: n GSM , D-AMPs , DECT Lower-bandwidth packet-switched bears: n SMS , CDPD , GPRS Higher-bandwidth carriers : n Wireless LANs , WCDMA

Network Independence IP will provide the unifying glue for the increasingly heterogeneous, ubiquitous, and mobile environment Sophisticated network monitoring and control facilities will be needed A set of function calls used to acquire and to release network resources will be needed

Transport Optimization New technologies in the fixed network– ADSL and gigabit routing The bottleneck of end-to-end communication between mobile clients and fixed network will remain at the air interface

Transport Optimization Future transport architectures and protocols will have to: n n n Take full advantage of available bandwidth Provide optimized data delivery Offer error detection, recovery, and retransmission mechanisms

Terminal Independence One of the cornerstones of future advanced mobile systems will lie in the provision of capability negotiation and storage facilities in the network Terminal information will be accessible by service provider

Applications Support Services The success of new network technologies is driven by applications Mobile data will better sell with mobilespecific applications Personalized services will have an even higher impact in mobile environments n e. g. the success of short-message-service

Applications Support Services Alerting mechanisms will be implemented Deliver notifications to mobile users about time-critical event in their information spaces A variety of services will pop up that use access to a user’s location information

Application Programming Interface Introducing IP technology in mobile environment now makes it possible to adopt the successful client-server model The mobile API grants access to commonly used functions needed for building mobile-aware services

Application Programming Interface A terminal’s location can be gathered using a variety of mechanisms The information is available for application developers through a standardized function call using an agreed upon data format

The ACTS On. The. Move Prototype System overview Network Independence Content Adaptation Thin Clients

System Overview The ACTS On. The. Move project has prototyped and field-trailed a service platform for mobile computing This Mobile Application Support Environment(MASE) is built around the concepts of awareness, adaptation, and abstraction

System Overview All MASE services are accessible through a mobile API realized in Java The MASE ensures seamless and transparent service access, independent of the access network and the mobile device A data base residing in the network, containing : n User profile, device characteristics, network conditions, user preferences

Mobile Gateway MGs(mobile gateways) can be installed as mediators or proxy agents anywhere between the wireless and fixed network infrastructures Hold main parts of the profile database or provide an interface to it Offers service access to authorized applications

Network Independence MASE protocol architecture is located on the content service of the information service provider and on the MG MG acting as a mediator between the information server on the fixed network and the mobile client, containing a leightweight version of the MASE

MASE protocol stack

Physical architecture of MASE

Network Independence Roaming between circuit-switched GSM, multi-slot DECT, wireless LAN, and Ethernet was realized using an enhanced mobile IP implementation A change of the active network device without noticeable disruption of transport and application services is generally possible

Content Adaptation The MASE holds a hierarchically organized profile database The central component of the On. The. Move system architecture is the system adaptability manager(SAM)— n n Responsible for profile management Performing the multimedia conversion

Thin Clients Introducing an intelligent gateway in the mobile network has major advantages for small handheld devices Caching and prefetching facilities should be provided by the network rather than residing in the mobile—to support disconnected operations and fast information updates

Thin Clients The On. The. Move MASE and application prototpes on Windows CE PDAs demonstrated how thin clients can best be supported by middleware facilities The reuse of middleware facilities in different applications is the main benefit of the MASE approach

Wireless Application Protocol The wireless application protocol(WAP) is a new and powerful industry standard Integrate mobile telephony and the Internet Developed and promoted by the WAP Forum Providing Web content and advanced services to cellular subscribers

WAP overview Run globally across differing wireless transports: n n n SMS(short message service) USSD(unstructured supplementary service data) IS-136(American standard) CDPD(cellular digital packet data) PDC(Japanese personal digital cellular)

WAP overview Content and applications are envisaged to scale over a range of device types such as mobile phones, pagers, and PDAs The Wireless Application Environment (WAE) follows the client-server model from the World Wide Web

WAP protocol stack

WAP overview WAP gateway is added as a central interface between the Internet and the wireless world Client requests to the Internet are simply forwarded to the origin server Converse from HTML into the Wireless Mark-up Language (WML)

WML Offers a lightweight HTML representation WMLScript provides the lightweight procedural scripting language Wireless telephony application(WTA) and its interface(WTAI) provide the access and the programming interface to telephony services

WAP Evaluation The WAP provides a scalable and extensible platform both with respect to the wireless networks and to the client devices supported Frames do not scale very well for presentation on small ASCII phone displays, and WML cards do not work well on color PDAs

WAP Evaluation WAP works independently of the underlying wireless network But it does not provide any monitoring and roaming features and does not support automatic service adaptation For true mobile multimedia support some extensions and refinements to the current WAP specifications will be necessary

WAP Conclusions WAP is the first concept that unites the mobile voice and data market around a common platform It is the short-term enabler for mobile data communication in cellular environments It will be crucial that WAP define a set of Java APIs

The Next-Generation HTTP-NG has been submitted to the IETF as an Internet draft HTTP-NG is an object-oriented messaging framework with a multiplexing transport

HTTP-NG stack

HTTP-NG overview The HTTP-NG’s respects: n n n Reduce the traffic on the network Decreasing the number of TCP connections Minimizing round trip times The Classical Web Application(TCWA) has been developed to demonstrate the feasibility of surfing the web using HTTP -NG

HTTP-NG overview TCWA uses the HTTP-NG framework to define a traditional HTTP 1. 1 Web server and browser Proxies have been part of the Web architecture Proxy translate between different transports and data formats, to preserve a global information space

HTTP-NG Evaluation Currently, the HTTP-NG only exists in laboratory implementations The W 3 C conducted a series of tests of HTTP-NG over a mobile service We believe that it should be possible to optimize HTTP-NG to a much higher degree than HTTP 1. 1, due to its objectoriented nature

HTTP-NG Conclusions The deployment of HTTP-NG will depend on both application developers and device manufacturers The W 3 C is working within the IETF, and with the WAP Forum, to achieve as broad a deployment in the wireless industry as possible

Mobile Station Execution Environment The Mobile Station Execution Environment(MEx. E) is the name of ETSI SMG’s project team targeting GSM’s evolution toward a client/server architecture A dynamic and open architecture within the mobile station(MS) and subscriber identity module(SMI) is required

MEx. E overview The basic idea is to specify a terminalindependent execution environment on the client(MS+SIM) for nonstandardized applications and to implement a mechanisms Allows the negotiation of supported capabilities

MEx. E overview MEx. E services will be available from— n n n Traditional GSM nodes IN nodes Operator-specific nodes Operator-franchised nodes Service provider nodes These nodes constitute the MEx. E service environment

MEx. E Evaluation Introduction of the MEx. E classmark 1 devices: n Small devices MEx. E classmark 2 devices: n Contemporary sophisticated devices The MEx. E classmark introduces scalability into mobile Internet access

MEx. E Classmark 1, based on WAP, requires only very limited input and output facilities on the client side Design to provide quick and cheap information access Over narrow and slow data connections

MEx. E Classmark 2, based on Personal-Java, provides a run-time system Requires more processing, storage, display, and network resource Allows more powerful applications and more flexible MMIs

MEx. E Conclusion The development of the ETSI SMG MEx. E standard is a major step toward the migration of the telecommunication and information industries and a prerequisite for the success of mobile data services

Conclusions Future mobile devices will need a much higher degree of support from the higher layers of the protocol stack than is possible today Wireless devices will be an integrated component in the network architectures of the future

Conclusion Future third-generation mobile networks like UMTS are not standardized with a complete set of services Services capabilities and the means for service negotiation based on user profiles are being standardized MEx. E, WAP, and W 3 C are the building blocks for the realization of this virtual environment