An approach to 4th generation wireless infrastructures-scenarios and key research issues

Studying the feasibility and viability of various future infrastructure architectures and potential road-maps of their deployment is the focus of the 4th Generation Wireless Infrastructures (4GW) project within the strategic Personal Computing and Communication (PCC) program (Molin 1998). In attempting to realize the PCC vision "mobile multimedia to all at today's prices for fixed telephony", a difficult problem arises. In contrast to the process of solving engineering and business problems in current or imminent wireless systems, where system concepts, requirements and markets are reasonably well known, very little is known about these things over a 10 year horizon. The approach used in the project to tackle this problem, is to use various scenario techniques. Plausible scenarios which describe the telecommunication scene in 2010 and which are used to determine potential technological and other bottlenecks in order to find key areas for research in this field are a very important element in these studies. Some of these scenarios are presented in this paper, together with some implications regarding bottlenecks and key research issues. The results are presented in terms of working assumptions (WAs) used with the project. The WAs are also proposed to provide a framework for interrelating different research activities within PCC.