Access selection and mobility management in a beyond 3G RAN: The WINNER approach

Next generation communications will be composed of flexible, scalable and context-aware, secure and resilient architectures. The technologies will allow full mobility of the user and enable dynamic management policies that ensure end-to-end secure transmission of data and services across heterogeneous infrastructures and networks. The concept of ubiquitous and scalable system is applied in the IST WINNER II project to deliver optimum performance for different deployment scenarios from local area to wide area wireless networks. The integration of cellular and local area networks in a unique radio system will provide a great advantage to final users and operators, compared with the nowadays situation, where there are many standalone systems and users equipped with different subscriptions, radio interfaces and terminals. To this issue, the IST project WINNER II has defined three system modes suited to local, metropolitan and wide area respectively. This paper describes the mobility management and access selection schemes that are proposed for the WINNER system that is designed as a candidate Beyond 3G type of system. A radio resource management (RRM) architecture that fully enables the functionality of these schemes will also be presented. The RRM schemes are based on specially designed cooperation RRM algorithms for the successful coexistence and handover of WINNER with new and legacy systems. The paper describes the cooperation architecture and mobility management functionalities and the rules that are applied for the support of mobility within the above scenarios.