FLAVIA: Towards a generic MAC for 4G mobile cellular networks

The future 4
^th
generation IMT-Advanced standards for 3GPP and IEEE 802.16 are LTE-A and IEEE 802.16m, respectively. While at a detailed level IEEE 802.16m and 3GPP LTE-A seem to be significantly different, on a conceptual and functional level both technologies use similar approaches for medium access and radio resource management and are very similar at the PHY layer. In this paper, we analyse both technologies with the goal of finding common functional subsets which can be used as building blocks for a generic and extensible MAC for future mobile cellular networks. To this end, we propose a systematic categorization into services, interfaces, functions and primitives as a first step towards achieving generic architecture.