A practical approach for 4G systems: deployment of overlay networks

Experimental activities play a vital role in the deployment and development of novel radio access networks. In particular the movement from 3G to 4G poses new challenges, which need to be solved using practical approaches such as testbeds. This paper presents a testbed that can be regarded as an early attempt to build a 4G system. It fully integrates heterogeneous wireless technologies using a loosely-coupled architecture. Also, experimental results are included to show the possibilities of this setup.