Convergence Aspects of Autonomic Cooperative Networking

The current trends in research and industry aim to develop new networking paradigms that would be able to bring ubiquitous on-demand services. This may be achievable thanks to the fact that the end user mobile devices are envisaged to support cutting edge technologies such as cooperative transmission. However, a real advancement will only be attainable when the grounds for cooperative mobile networking have been accurately established. In fact, looking at the concept of the relay enhanced cell, one can come across some commonalities with mobile ad-hoc networks. This especially holds true for local area scenarios where the base station might be usually perceived as an access point while the fixed and/or movable relay nodes might be replaced by movable and/or mobile end user devices. Moreover, such a cooperative mobile network needs to accommodate the fact that the end user devices can expose certain dose of autonomy allowing them to auto-discover and choose to play certain roles. Last but not least, the network needs to be driven by a management overlay platform interacting or being a part of an operations support system deployed by the network operator.