Issues in protocol evolution for personal telecommunications

There has been a rapid development of systems that provide mobile services. The main aspect for the market is represented by the unprecedented subscriber growth. The present paper deals with the evolution towards more and more sophisticated services, by analysing the consequences on some of the basic parts of the network, that is management and signalling protocols. Protocols will represent the backbone of future systems, defining what will be provided. Their development is the result of an evolutionary process involving already consolidated protocols and others undergoing rapid evolution. The current trend of the integration of mobile systems into modern fixed networks, with homogeneous database access and the alignment of services and facilities provided to users, requires a parallel study of the developments in the two domains. After such an analysis the paper concentrates on the specific issues related to the radio interface management.