Simultaneous usage of WLAN and UTRAN for improved multimedia and data applications

With the advent of the age of 3G networks and WLANs also interworking concepts and convergence scenarios will become important. A special flavour of interworking is the simultaneous usage of both access technologies. As enabling entity a convergence manager can abstract the increased complexity on the lower layers towards the applications and can therefore handle the spreading of user traffic transparently, satisfying user and operator defined policies. The location of this convergence manager is a crucial issue. Therefore, This work discusses two different placement concepts and evaluates them by applying realistic use cases. Furthermore, two new fields of application for the simultaneous usage of standards shall be investigated, the video channel splitting and the web services channel spreading. The concepts presented in this paper are results of the FLOWS project, which is taking place within the framework of the European IST programme.