Foreword


The wireless market is already a huge market, with over 1 billion active mobile wireless users worldwide. The wireless operators' revenues passed $300B mark in 2001 and are continuing to grow. Wireless voice, in particular, has been a huge success for the industry. Driven by the increased mobility of society, as well as the convenience, simplicity, competitive rates, and attractive offers from the wireless operators, there has been a significant shift in voice minutes from fixed wireline networks to wireless networks.

Wireless data has had a limited success up until recently. SMS (short message service) has been a huge and unexpected success, especially with young consumers. Today, more than 1 billion SMS messages are sent worldwide per day, contributing around 10 “12% of operators' revenues. Encouraged by the SMS success, as well as the i-Mode success in Japan, wireless operators have been deploying 2.5G GPRS and cdma2000 packet/IP based networks in order to get into the wireless data market in earnest.

Building on the proven and profitable model of SMS, wireless operators are busy today rolling out MMS (Multimedia Messaging Service), utilizing their packet/IP-based networks. Even though the success of MMS is far from guaranteed , there are various positive projections for significant revenues from such services. MMS could be the next big mass-market opportunity for wireless data, provided that the industry players get it right!

In fact, wireless operators have recognized recently that it is the services and applications that will deliver future growth for them. As a result, there has been significant increase in investment and attention placed on the development and deployment of services and applications that are considered compelling to attract and retain subscribers and that help with the average revenue per user (ARPU) growth. Almost all the operators around the world are busy building service and application infrastructures to offer services, as well as to stimulate the growth of third-party applications. However, wireless operators will have a small percentage of these services and applications hosted within their networks (as low as 5 “10%); for the rest of the services and applications, they will have to rely on third-party applications hosted and offered from outside of their networks. The Application Programming Interfaces (APIs), primarily revenue sharing, charging, and security, will be critical for the success of these third-party applications. Today, around 85% of revenues are voice- related , but most operators are projecting 30 “40% of their revenues to come from various wireless data applications in the coming years . Thus, data services and applications are going to be very critical for wireless operators growth in the future.

The next major wireless network build-out will be based on 3rd generation (3G) radio and network technologies. Some wireless operators have paid huge sums of money for 3G spectrum licenses, especially in Europe. These 3G networks will enable much more capacity, as well as higher speed data rates for mobile wireless applications, enabling wireless operators new revenue streams. However, the pace of 3G network deployments will be tied to the success of wireless data applications such as MMS in the near term .

The wireless operators are facing major challenges for different parts of their wireless networks today. For radio networks, the top issue is cost, from site acquisition and site preparation to actual hardware and software that needs to be deployed at each and every site. More sites are needed to accommodate increasing traffic, new features, and new technologies. Another big pain point is adequate or appropriate coverage, which is very much tied to the number, type, and location of sites. Coverage is also tied to the quality of service and dropped call rates, especially in hand-over situations (e.g., driving on the highway ).

For radio access networks (RANs), the top issue is again cost, but this time it is mostly operational expenditure (OPEX) that may concern the operators, who do not own wireline infrastructure. Considering that there are thousands, if not tens of thousands, of cell sites that need to be connected to BSCs/MSCs, this cost could be as much as 30 “40% of the total OPEX for the wireless operator.

For the circuit switched part of the core network, the major pain point remains cost, but this time it includes capital expenditure (CAPEX) and OPEX. Circuit switches (i.e., MSCs) are both costly and difficult to offer new services on, and wireless operators would like to cap their investments in MSCs as they move to all-IP networks. However, there are several major challenges for the packet switched part of the core network as well. As more packet/IP based networks are being deployed, the emerging challenges are primarily in scalability, security, addressing, new charging paradigms , and quality of service.

As the wireless operators are faced with these challenges mentioned above, they are developing and implementing strategies to cope with them. They are extending the life of their 2G/2.5G networks, getting more out of them, such as launching more wireless data services with GPRS. They are announcing infrastructure sharing for 3G deployments with other operators and better timing their 3G investments and deployments, tying it with adequate device and market demand availability.

Wireless operators are also evolving their networks towards end-to-end all-IP networks, driven by three fundamental factors:

  • Significant cost reduction There is a strong expectation that significant cost savings, in the range of 30+% can be achieved in terms of CAPEX and OPEX by implementing various IP technologies through-out the wireless infrastructure.

  • Significant new revenue generation There is a strong expectation that significant new applications and new revenue sources would be enabled, and in particular third-party application development be facilitated by utilizing IP technologies on an end-to-end basis.

  • Shorter time to market All-IP networks will most likely enable new service launches with much shorter time to market.

Wireless operators, as well as the infrastructure suppliers, have been working on the definition of standards for the evolution of both GSM networks and the CDMA networks toward this end-to-end all-IP target architecture. Standards that enable smooth evolution have already been defined and some products are already commercially available, and the rest are projected to become available by mid-2004.

The key enabling technologies for this evolution will be SIP (session initiation protocol), IPv6, IP over-the-air optimization, as well as QoS, security, and other IP-related enhancements. IP would become the overriding transport technology, definitely capping TDM and potentially capping and/or replacing the ATM technology at both radio access networks (RANs) as well as in the core networks.

Since significant voice traffic growth is still expected for wireless networks, the business case for VoIP, with the use if SIP, is not based on replacement of existing TDM networks, but rather on capping such networks and putting the growth as well as new services, such as "rich call" services on such real-time IP networks. "Rich call" is a type of real-time multimedia service that will be enabled with the use of SIP, SIP application platforms, and opening up the services layer to third parties through APIs.

There are several potential paradigm changes or discontinuities that may take place in the wireless operators' networks as a result of all-IP network direction. The key technical paradigm shifts could come from the separation of the signaling and bearer channels, for all multimedia services, even for IP services. Also, the multimedia services, starting with MMS, combining voice, data and image, not to mention video clips, will create key requirements and we should expect some disruptive technologies in this space. Also, the core networks will evolve to MPLS-enabled, mobility-enabled, IPv6-based routing environments, and thus today's routers will need to undergo a relatively major overhaul .

Wireless local area networks (WLANs) based on 802.11 standards have experienced significant growth as extension of enterprise networks. However, there are several challenges such as security, cost, and seamlessness, for WLANs in the enterprise market. The availability of WLANs for public hot spots has drawn the attention of the wireless operators, and they have been evaluating them for such deployments. Cost economics for WLANs vs. GPRS/3G are such that it would be orders of magnitude cheaper to provide high speed access for wireless operators in hot spots using WLAN technologies, if they can be somehow integrated into the wireless operators' infrastructure. In fact, the WLANs and GPRS/3G are very complementary if they are deployed and interoperated effectively. In return, wireless operators are a good choice for public WLAN offerings for mobile professionals, since they already have the customer/billing relationship and cater for broader mobility requirements of these users.

I strongly believe that this exciting field of wireless networks, and their evolution to all-IP networks, is full of many challenges and opportunities. This book, authored by well-recognized industry experts, provides a comprehensive explanation of the field, and will serve as an informative reference for those of us working in this industry.

Dr.  Mehmet  S.  Unsoy
Former  VP,  Chief  Wireless  Architect
mmO2  (formerly  BT  Wireless)
munsoy@yahoo.com
November  2002



IP in Wireless Networks
IP in Wireless Networks
ISBN: 0130666483
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2003
Pages: 164

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