A generic model for reconfigurable protocol stacks in beyond 3G

Abstract

Global consensus on the evolution of wireless communications beyond 3G sketches a heterogeneous infrastructure that comprises different wireless systems in a complementary manner and is vested with reconfiguration capabilities that enable the flexible and dynamic adaptation of the wireless network infrastructure and spectrum resources to meet the ever-changing service requirements. For ubiquitous reconfiguration to become commonplace in wireless mobile communications, a global architecture for modeling, expressing and circulating metadata essential to reconfiguration, including reconfigurable device capabilities and semantic properties of reconfigurable protocol stacks, is necessary. We outline relative standardization initiatives in the mobile domain, summarize existing work in reconfiguration architectures and identify key shortcomings that may hinder the advent of ubiquitously reconfigurable systems. Further on, we point out some major limitations of current metadata standards in the mobile domain for the representation of capability information pertaining to reconfigurable protocol stacks. We identify essential metadata classes in support of reconfigurable communication systems, and introduce an associated object-oriented UML model. We elaborate on the design rationale of the UML model, presenting and discussing the alternative metadata representation standards and suitable encoding formats. Finally, we demonstrate the suitability of our UML model by applying it for the cases of a standardized protocol stack of 3G mobile devices and stationary 3G cellular network elements.