Roaming, hand-off and services continuity for voice services in converged wireless networks

The success of Wi-Fi and emergence of Wi-MAX creates exciting technology and business challenges for the communication industry. Roaming, seamless voice and data hand-offs, in conjunction with continuity of voice services such as messaging, push-to-talk, and voicemail, are posing the next technology and business challenges. Services convergence among Wi-Fi, Wi-MAX, and cellular networks is creating opportunities for both wireless, and wireline service providers. Similar opportunity exists for enterprises for the first time. Services convergence can give enterprises the freedom similar to "PBX"es for wireless access on and off campuses. As the business cases for enterprises and wireline service providers are pitted against each other on the commercial front, the technologies will evolve out of market leverage, presence and acceptance. This poses a challenge for technologists to create a technology that is easily deployable in target scenarios. The requirements exist for a solution that, independently of the end user and service providing entity, can fulfil the "service quality" expectations of users and providers. In this talk, we discuss the requirements of voice service convergence solutions, protocols, standardization effort, and challenges for solution development. We also allude to the opportunities for research and development of newer technologies. These innovations will breach the current gaps in convergence of services beyond packet to circuit call control mechanisms and extend them across different access technologies, such as Wi-Fi, Wi-MAX, GSM, CDMA, and others.