Hybrid Wireless Networks: Applications, Architectures and New Perspectives

With the advent and ubiquitous of wireless technology, a wide range of advanced services are expected to be supported including appealing services that currently exist in wired systems. Nevertheless, the resource constraints in wireless environment may render difficulty to realizing all the desirable services. Consequently, an infrastructure with high data rate is necessary to complement the resource constraints and to act as anchor points linking mobile nodes to other fixed networks as the Internet. Hybrid wireless networks have emerged as a promising solution, allowing mobile clients to achieve higher performance and service access in a seamless manner independent of their existence in wireless LAN (WLAN) communication range. In this paper we address the benefits of hybrid wireless networks, showing their possible applications and presenting a classification for their emerging architectures. Also, we identify the research challenge arising from the problem of applying the grid computing concept in such hybrid wireless environment, showing the expected benefits from the aggregated fixed-mobile capacity. Finally, we propose our vision for a potential architectural model, which is expected to provide useful services by the network operator or the service provider in such a hybrid environment