Managing IP traffic in radio access networks of next-generation mobile systems

The strong research, standardization, and development activity currently focusing on the enabling technologies for the transition to a new generation of mobile networks represent a great opportunity to accomplish the goal of IP multimedia service provisioning to mobile users. This will contribute to the migration toward an all-IP platform with guaranteed end-to-end QoS provisioning, and will definitively fuel the deployment of new multimedia mobile applications and the further development of multimedia ubiquitous communications. This objective is not easily achievable, mainly due to the difficulties in handling IP multimedia applications in a mobile environment with a guaranteed QoS level. To contribute to this issue, in this article we discuss an evolutionary scenario from the current UMTS system to a next-generation QoS-aware mobile platform based on IP as the transport solution in the radio access network, UTRAN. Furthermore, we propose to fit the IntServ-over-DiffServ approach, in order to best manage the QoS level inside the UTRAN.