Managing PI-resources in 4G wireless systems: the opportunistic way

Integration of different radio access networks will become a reality in the near future. Our interworking architecture assumes a ubiquitous primary network (the cellular one) and secondary networks used on an availability basis. Secondary networks form islands of coverage providing partial and intermittent (PI) resources with greater quality of service as the user moves along. This paper describes an application architecture that manages these resources in an opportunistic way. It makes use of the open service access (OSA) to control the core network and the OSA application servers to host the new applications that can take advantage of the PI-resources. These applications create a context for secondary networks and the context can survive losses of coverage.