Radio independence in the network architecture of the Universal Mobile Telecommunication System

This paper presents the concept of radio independence developed within the European ACTS Rainbow project, as well as the network architecture proposed by the project for the Universal Mobile Telecommunication System. This concept is first defined, and then used to classify the entities of the network architecture into radio dependent or radio independent groups. Both the control entities and the transport protocol stacks are considered. A flexible way to implement radio dependent control entities in the core network is presented. A comparison is then made with the ITU views on modularity for the IMT-2000 systems family.