Evolving beyond UMTS - the MIND research project

With the first commercial 3G systems nearing deployment and the standardisation of future UMTS releases well advanced, research has now started to map out the longer term evolution of mobile networks to extend and improve UMTS in more fundamental ways. The EU IST project MIND (and its predecessor BRAIN) have taken a wide ranging view of this subject, considering user applications, network architectures, and future broadband radio interfaces with a timescale of 5-10 years beyond UMTS. The main network concepts considered here are unified mobility management and QoS support in an 'all-IP' infrastructure. Security is also a critical issue in future networks, but here MIND will take its lead from other research activities and current standardisation work. The main additional goals are to enable multi-radio integration and novel mechanisms which allow the cost effective deployment of a high density of base stations a likely necessity for future high bandwidth wireless access, given the shortage of available spectrum.