Development of Mobile Communications Systems Beyond Third Generation

Second generation mobile radio systems have been successfully deployed worldwide. These systems are evolved to higher data rates and packet transmission. Third generation mobile radio systems will be initially deployed in 2001 and 2002 in different regions of the world. Advanced multimedia services are under development and first services are already being offered in second generation systems. Due to the megatrend of the rapid growth of Internet type services packet oriented traffic is exceeding circuit switched traffic. Therefore, communication systems will be developed and optimized for packed oriented traffic. This paper presents a vision of a system beyond third generation mobile communications, which comprises a combination of several optimized access systems on a common IP based medium access and core network platform. These different access systems will interwork by horizontal and vertical handover, service negotiation and global roaming. The different access systems are allocated to different mutually complementing cell layers with respect to cell size, coverage and mobility to provide globally optimized seamless services to users.