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Mankind witnesses today the spectacular growing of mobile communications all around the world and the interest in it dramatically increases with each day. New telecommunication services and telematic applications are the strong drive of this progress, and they pose new requirements to network design and construction issues. To implement those new services within a new-generation mobile network, a set of novel network architectures, protocols and traffic-related mechanisms have to be invented. It is anticipated that the most important, value-added and revenue-expected new services for the mobile network will be Internet access and Internet Protocol (IP) multimedia applications.
As shown in a number of R&D projects world-wide, on the basis of a plain fixed Internet access it is possible to implement a set of brand-new applications for which certain Quality of Service (QoS) requirements need to be provided. No doubt, QoS for Internet applications will be heavily demanded by the end-users. Indeed “Internet QoS goes mobile” is why, with respect to the existing experience on the implementation of QoS within fixed networks, design, development and implementation of QoS-capable mobile networks is of paramount importance.
Europe wants to proceed with a leading role in the area, as in the case of GSM (2nd generation system), GPRS (2.5 generation system), UMTS (3rd generation system) and wireless local area networks (e.g., HIPERLAN 1 and HIPERLAN 2). In fact, next-generation mobile systems, dealing with broadband multimedia communications (with bandwidth, henceforth data rates, much higher than 3rd generation one), are of significant importance for the R&D community within the whole of Europe. As stated earlier, the fast development and deployment of new mobile systems will be mainly driven by multimedia traffic. That is the reason why the field of modern mobile communications consists of two very important components, the network and the traffic, and research must be carried out by taking both of them into account.
With respect to the presented state-of-the-art of mobile R&D fields nowadays, the purpose of this COST Action is to bring together researchers in the fields of telecommunications and computer networks as well as multimedia applications designers, network and service providers and general-purpose software developers. The shared knowledge here is lying exactly in the area of traffic engineering and QoS control for next-generation multimedia services, an expertise, which is believed, will bring significant benefits to all the European research community. This area is becoming of utmost strategic importance from both the research perspective and the industrial one. In this domain, the USA and Europe are sufficiently active, but Europe lacks a strong coordination between academic and industrial worlds. This COST Action will influence and contribute R&D efforts on a number of topics, as discussed below.
The need and timeliness of COST Action 290, focusing on QoS issues, traffic and pricing aspects for the delivery of multimedia services in future mobile communication networks, is evident. A COST Action is the right approach to deal with these research fields due to the need and possibility of collecting contributions from all the European countries, thus utilising the work and the experience of many researchers and service developers.
For more information visit COST 290 web site.
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