Abstract :
Convergence of wireless communications, computing and Internet is on the way. This will be the driving force towards a wireless multimedia society. In this paper, we overview today´s standards of 3G cellular and wireless LAN systems. There are two trends complementing each other: enhancing the cellular technology (3G WCDMA, cdma2000, etc) and enhancing the wireless LAN technology (HiperLAN, IEEE 802.11, HiSWAN, etc). More or less, these two technologies have been evolving independently, but now, coordination between these two have been considered viable to realize the broadband communication era. Recently, discussions on 4th generation (4G) wireless systems have been intensified. We foresee how wireless systems will evolve into global 4G wireless systems. In global 4G wireless, cellular and wireless LAN systems architectures may become closer and will work together via the IP core network. The difference between them may be that the former offers seamless handoff for real-time services but the latter offers seamless roaming for nomadic services, focusing on very high-speed data communications close to 1 Gbit/s.
Keywords :
3G mobile communication; 4G mobile communication; IEEE standards; Internet; broadband networks; cellular radio; data communication; mobile computing; multimedia communication; packet radio networks; quality of service; wireless LAN; 3G cellular standard; 4th generation wireless systems; HiSWAN; HiperLAN; IEEE 802.11; IP core network; Internet computing; WCDMA; broadband wireless systems; cdma2000; global 4G wireless systems; nomadic services; real-time services; seamless handoff; seamless roaming; very high-speed data communications; wireless LAN; wireless multimedia; Broadband communication; Cellular networks; Cellular phones; Internet; Local area networks; Multiaccess communication; Multimedia systems; Roaming; Wireless LAN; Wireless communication;
