Mobile communications beyond third generation

Mobile communications play an important role towards the information society Second generation systems have evolved to higher data rates and packet transmission. Third generation mobile radio systems will be initially deployed in 2001 and 2002 in different regions of the World. Advanced multimedia services are under development and the first services are already being offered in second generation systems. Due to the megatrend of the rapid growth of Internet type services packet oriented traffic is exceeding circuit switched traffic. Therefore communication systems will be developed and optimized for packed oriented traffic. Mobile Internet will be a dominant application for future mobile communication systems. This paper presents a vision of a system beyond third generation mobile communications, which comprises a combination of several optimized access systems on a common IP based medium access and core network platform. These different access systems will interwork by horizontal and vertical handover, service negotiation and global roaming.