Mobile multimedia metropolitan area network; an office LAN extension to the 4G mobile network

This work proposes an MM-MAN (mobile multimedia metropolitan area network) featuring extended Office LAN services as a component of the 4G mobile networks. The extended LAN services offer VPN circuits between mobile terminals and their home office LAN, and allow mobile terminals to behave as if they were in the home office LAN. The VPN circuit here means IP address concealment using private IP address offered by the MM-MAN. Payload should be concealed by the users themselves; since the terminal is considered to be in the office LAN itself, and thus, users do not want payload encryption and decryption by the network operator. To support fast mobility, PON (passive optical network) is used as terrestrial network of the MM-MAN. Downlink packets are broadcast through PON to all micro-cells in the same LMC (logical macro-cell) to allow packet transfer over the wireless interface to fast-moving terminals at any cell, and uplink packets can be sent out from any micro-cell in the same LMC. The LMC consists of several adjacent micro-cells. To quicken packet transfer to moving terminals in the micro-cellular environment, polling is conducted in parallel in every micro-cell of each LMC, and the micro-cell, which receives response multicasts the response to other micro-cells to synchronize for the next polling.