Mobile and wireless Internet access

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Abstract

The explosive growth in wireless networks and Internet creates considerable demand on wireless carriers to provide wireless Internet services. There are many challenges to overcome in order to realize true wireless Internet service solution. This paper reviews those challenges in wireless networks from mobility perspective and identifies important areas that have to be resolved to create a framework for universal Mobility in wireless Internet. It will be shown that to obtain a good quality of service on wireless Internet one of the challenge is to ‘hide’ user Mobility. However, in order to improve performance and obtain a reliable point-to-point communication in wireless networks, some modifications are necessary.

Introduction

In the last few years, we have seen an increase in the use of Internet systems as well as an increase in mobile communications.

Now, many services of high utility to the end users are based on the Internet technology. If a convergence of the mobile and Internet technologies can be achieved, it would be a powerful force in realizing vast economies of scale as well as highly flexible services platform [1].

Until now, the growth in wireless data service has been impeded by several factors like:

  • Relatively higher cost and fragmentation of wireless access standards,

  • Low speed wireless access links,

  • Expensive user devices,

  • Lack of core packet network infrastructure,

  • Lack of synergy with Internet and web-based applications development environment.

Nevertheless, the push for wireless service exists. For example, the worldwide number of cellular, PCS and other wireless subscribers has increased from about 140 millions in 1996 to 280 millions in 1998 and is expected to reach 650 millions by 2001.

But no more than one million wireless data users are in the United States today, whereas there are more than 50 millions cellular/PCS users. The market is expected to be very large and the companies are preparing for it. Just in the US, capital investment in cellular and PCS has increased from $ 6.3 billion in 1990 to $ 60.5 billion in 1998 and service revenues are up from $ 4.5 to $ 33.1 billion. During the same period, the average local monthly bill has reduced from $ 80 to $ 39 indicating the advances in technology and the tremendous competition among cellular and PCS service providers [1].

But, to manage a reliable wireless Internet, three kinds of constraints have to be studied:

  • The wireless operating environment,

  • The existing Internet architecture,

  • The limitation of the end devices.

Section snippets

Three technologies

We can find three technologies, as illustrated in Fig. 1:

  • Wireless WANs,

  • Wireless MANs,

  • Wireless LANs.

Data management

The characteristics of wireless networks showed us that to manage reliable wireless Internet, we definitely have to consider the following subjects:

  • Speed of wireless link,

  • Scalability,

  • Mobility,

  • Limited battery power,

  • Disconnection (voluntary or involuntary),

  • Replication/caching,

Wireless internet over a digital cellular telephone network—the MOWGLI architecture:

The goal of this project (Fig. 7) was first, to examine the behavior of data communication over cellular telephone links and second, to develop architectural solutions to overcome difficulties typical for this kind of mobile wireless environment.

The constraints were:

  • No modification to TCP/IP architecture at fixed hosts (no change to an existing and reliable communication architecture),

  • To provide an API (Application Programming Interface) allowing easy development of new mobile client

Conclusions

The major characteristics of the next generation networks must be open IP enabled services and applications, single consistent multimedia network infrastructure, simultaneous voice and data with high quality of service, and access technology independence.

Some of the key capabilities being considered are:

  • 144–384 kbps for wide area cellular, 2 Mbps in local area and 10–15 Mbps in local fixed environments like wireless LANs,

  • multimedia network with simultaneous connection of different traffic types,

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