Fixed-mobile Convergence: Infrastructure, functionality, services — The combo perspective

Fixed-mobile convergence initially focused on optimizing fixed and mobile telephone infrastructure for voice services. The appearance of VoIP and smartphones, the growing popularity of social networks and video hosting services, the emerging of 5G, Internet of Things, machine-to-machine communication and ever newer over-the-top services motivated manufacturers, network operators and service providers to refocus and data delivery. The tutorial highlights the structural and functional aspects for efficiently instrumenting this convergence process, including infrastructure considerations, network function virtualization, software defined networking, unified functionality. The presentations are embedded into an overview of the past efforts, a summary of the state of the art, and a look-ahead for future communications networks. The authors are members of the Combo European consortium working on fixed-mobile convergence.