No. 293 (January 2003)

UMTS and related communication technologies – Part II

Introduction

On the bookshelves today, one can find a proliferation of publications on telecommunications. Compared to digital broadcasting, books about the Internet and mobile telephony are extremely well represented. These telecom books are however of varying quality. Many are a simple reproduction of the ETSI standards, with only few editorial touches. However, there are a small number of exceptionally well-written books. The two that I am reviewing here are among those: they are both comprehensive, accurate, well documented, clear and logically structured.

These two books were conceived in times when 3G, UMTS and the Internet received a lot of attention from the media and analysts. The hype surrounding these new communication systems and services is much lower these days. The underlying concepts described in these two books are still valid but for different reasons.

IP services have certainly garnered a lot of attention from the media and analysts recently. But a critical factor has gone largely unnoticed – and that is that, no doubt, the service providers and carriers are still losing money on their IP services. (The irony is that the old-school ATM and Frame Relay services are still generating most of their revenues today.) However, the situation in the future may change, and these two books are looking into the future.

The first book, having a cryptic name "IP for 3G", is a highly technical book. It describes the ways how the Internet Protocol (IP) could be introduced in mobile telecommunications systems.

The second book is basically an inventory of possible services and applications that UMTS may be able to provide when fully deployed.

IP for 3G

The main impact that IP could have on 3rd generation telecommunications (3G) systems such as UMTS (Universal Mobile Telecommunications System) is to help the convergence of the Internet and Communications. There are predictions (speculations?) which suggest that such convergence could lead to a fall in the unit cost of communications – by a factor of 1000 by the year 2015. This convergence may cause a massive growth in demand and, hence, large economies of scale. As IP may embrace both fixed and mobile networks, a single infrastructure for all localised and personalised multimedia delivery – to any IP-enabled terminal over any access technology – could be achieved. The user experience will be the same regardless of whether they are on a fixed or mobile network.

For the broadcasters, the question applies whether or not we should join in this "El Dorado" convergence and capitalise on IP as a common denominator for developing a wider choice of common applications.

This is a technical book about wireless/mobile networks and their future. Its main objective is to describe why and how IP may be introduced in communications systems such as UMTS. Whereas IP is now ubiquitously used in fixed (wired) networks such as LANs and the Internet, the question is "what are the advantages and disadvantages of IP being introduced and used in mobile (wireless) networks?". As wired and wireless networks are fundamentally different in terms of latency, propagation loss and network architecture, "could IP be of use at all?".

The book gives a very comprehensive description of the future 3G mobile networks, as well as the networks that will make use of the IP layered stack. It also outlines the detailed engineering and economic reasons for IP in 3G. An "All-IP Network" is set as an objective towards which the telecommunications world should move.

Nevertheless, the book is not just a straightforward propaganda for IP; it highlights possible barriers to its market implementation, as well as the many problems and difficulties where current IP protocols do not (yet) provide a solution. The Quality of Services (QoS) and IP mobility are two such areas that require further in-depth study. The book provides excellent introductions (containing key questions, key terms and key problems) along with very comprehensive summaries and analyses of all topics that are important for understanding what is needed for IP in 3G to work. Each chapter provides informed responses to the questions posed initially.
One of the most important notions is the IP mobility which occurs when the user terminal moves either within or between different Administrative Domains (or Access Networks) – i.e. roaming. Solutions at the Link (Layer 2), IP (Layer 3) and Application layers have been implemented and are being used in practice.

One should distinguish between a fixed User Identifier (which mobile should the packets be delivered to?) and a variable Locator (where is the mobile currently located on the network?). The most common solution (but not the only one) is to allocate two different IP addresses to the mobile terminal: one stays constant (the User Identifier) while the other varies with the location (the Locator). In so-called "Mobile IP" terminology, the former is identified as the Home Address and the latter is termed the Care-of-Address (CoA) which is associated with the mobile's current location. A special router ("Home Agent") maintains the mapping between the mobile's home and care-of addresses. Messages are always addressed to the mobile's Home address and the home agent then tunnels them to the mobile's CoA.

Terminal mobility ensures that packets continue to be delivered to the mobile terminal (and thus the service continues), as it moves through the network and its point of attachment to the network changes.

Personal mobility refers to a user moving to a different terminal while remaining in contact and maintaining the service. The Internet equivalent is, for example, that the user connects through a WWW portal (such as Yahoo) to receive and send e-mails from different Internet cafés.

It should be pointed out that the deployment of IP Mobile protocol has been slow so far but may become increasingly important with the rise of peer-to-peer communications over IP networks.

The book discusses in quite some detail the QoS that 3G networks using IP could achieve. The IETF (Internet Engineering Task Force) has developed several Internet QoS mechanisms for real-time Internet services and applications. For example, the Integrated Services (IntServ) solution may provide hard QoS guarantees but is not scalable and is also very complex. MPLS (Multi-Protocol Label Switching) and Differentiated Services (DiffServ) do not provide full end-to-end solutions.

RSVF (Resource ReserVation Protocol) also needs some fixes before it will work well in the mobile environment. The book offers a very detailed discussion on some ideas how it would be possible to adapt these mechanisms to the wireless and mobile environments. Many of the approaches outlined are not yet mature enough to be rolled out on the market.

One particular outstanding issue for IP-over-wireless QoS is the poorly understood interaction between the wireless Link layer and the Network layer QoS mechanisms. As QoS builds more and more functionality into the network, it goes against the basic IP end-to-end principle. (The end-to-end principle means that the basic network only deals with IP packets and is therefore "dumb", as opposed to the terminals which have a sufficient level of processing and memory power and, thus, are "intelligent".)

One issue for IP QoS is essentially how to achieve high QoS levels, while maintaining the low level of network complexity. Critics of IP say that achieving the same level of QoS for Voice-over-IP will always be more expensive than for conventional telephony networks. Conversely, critics of the telephony networks say that these networks are over-engineered and expensive, and that they have unnecessarily high QoS requirements.

Clearly, there is some way for the telecommunications community to go forward, before these issues are fully resolved.
The overwhelming use of IP in 3G networks may lead communications networks on to the all-IP 4th generation. Consequently, the book concludes with the following equation (with a vague indication that this may happen in 2012!):

3G + IP = 4G

IP for 3G: Networking Technologies for Mobile Communications
Dave Wisely, Philip Eardley and Louise Burness
Hardbound volume of 295 pages
Ref: ISBN 0-471-48697-3. Price £34.95.
John Wiley & Sons, UK.
http://www.wileyeurope.com/cda/product/0,,0471486973,00.html

(back to top)

Services for UMTS: creating killer applications in 3G

The fundamental questions that this book attempts to answer are the following: "What are the possible services that could be provided by UMTS, and will UMTS be a profitable business and a viable investment?".

Although the book was published in 2002, it appears as if it was written before the burst of the Internet bubble and the deep crisis in the European Telecommunications industry. While some of the biggest European Telecoms companies – e.g. France Telecom and Deutsche Telekom – are crumbling under mountains of debt, the book asserts optimistically that "… UMTS will be a resounding success".

According to the present realities, the introduction of UMTS has not only been delayed but is being put under a very big question mark. Regardless of the commercial success of UMTS, the present book makes interesting reading, regarding the possible services that could sell over UMTS networks. Although the book is "UMTS-centred", it may also be of interest to the broadcasting community, as many services and applications identified in this book could readily be implemented in the interactive digital broadcast (radio/television) environment.

Therefore, this book should be regarded more as a comprehensive compendium of possible interesting "user-on-the-move" applications that could be implemented by means of any "convergent platform" – not solely by a given technology such as UMTS. It contains a number of useful marketing and attribute lists that could generally be applied to almost any services hoping to have some chance of success.

One such attribute list is the 5M list ("5M" stands for Movement, Moment, Me, Money and Machine). A successful UMTS service should meet all these attributes in order to be a success on the mass market.

In the Movement category, for example, there are some obvious (such as messaging) and some less obvious services that add value to the life of the traveller (maps, guides, local entertainment listings, hotels, cash machines, restaurants, car rental outlets, rescheduling of flights, intelligent timetables, etc), as well as various business services (Business-to-Business, Business-to-Consumer, Business-to-Employee) that require secure connectivity (confidentiality and privacy), access to the Internet and intranets at any time and anywhere, and access to collaborative applications (diary managers, action chasers, lists of contacts, meeting arrangers, etc). Furthermore, UMTS could offer help to people away from home – with services such as "tele-health" (for monitoring patients), emergency care and consultations with their medical practioner.

The book goes on to describe the services that address Moment needs. Those include, in particular, news, music and a variety of entertainment services. This is an area where the content is important. Broadcasters are familiar with this subject, as they are already offering such services to the general public, mainly for free.

UMTS potentially offers some novel opportunities based on dedicated, personalised services ("Me") such as personalised calls (the Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) is capable of delivering ringing tones that differ from one caller to another), interactive games, communities (virtual fan clubs), etc. The personalisation can be replicated across multiple devices and services. The user will be able to control his/her own profile, even several different profiles – one for work, one for the family and one for the tennis club, for example.
Mobile Commerce (mCommerce) and Mobile Banking (mBanking) are said to be one of the biggest opportunities for UMTS, but many such services already exist on 2G and 2.5G mobile phones. However, buying and consuming digital content on a mobile terminal may become attractive to many. For example, some people may want to buy a map or a crossword puzzle (if they get tired of phoning!).

The mobile terminal may become a universal personal device ("Machine") – not just for phoning and messaging but it could also help us to enjoy and control the media, and carry out transactions (buying tickets, selling items, lending money, auctioning, advertising, etc). Mobile terminals will be embedded in home appliances and will be part of automobile telematics, metering devices, robotics and voice-activated automation services. As these devices become ubiquitous, they may become very cheap (or even given away for free when bundled with the UMTS services) and more user-friendly (with a better display, slicker and longer battery life). They may supersede radio and even TV devices. For example, advanced hand-held, two-dimensional, displays will be integrated into cellular phones and will allow the users to tap into the images that would appear on a full-size desktop monitor. Such systems are already commercially available by Microvision – http://www.mvis.com (not given in the book) – but the prices are currently still relatively high.

The rest of the book is about marketing … how to sell UMTS and its services to the consumer. The key to that is of course a segmentation of the market. Different marketing approaches apply to the different market segments, such as business, adults and youth. Various loyalty schemes could help: mobile operators teaming up with the mega-market providers to offer rewards to end-users.
The book concludes with a famous saying of the polar explorer, Roald Amundsen: "Victory awaits those who have everything in order: people call this luck".

So are the authors of this book certain that UMTS has all the elements "in order" – to be lucky enough for UMTS to take off? Regretably, the book fails to provide enough evidence for that.

Services for UMTS: Creating killer applications in 3G
Edited by Tomi T. Ahonen and Joe Barrett
Hardbound volume of 373 pages
Ref: ISBN 0-471-48550-0. Price £34.95.
John Wiley & Sons, UK.
http://www.wileyeurope.com/cda/product/0,,0471485500,00.html

Franc Kozamernik

(back to top)

European Broadcasting Union Case postale 45 Ancienne Route 17A CH-1218 Grand-Saconnex Geneva Switzerland techreview@ebu.ch