Study of the joint employment of multiple differing radio access technologies (RAT), coexisting in a composite radio environment, with the aim of enabling versatile wireless access to enhanced QoS-aware IP services. More detailed objectives include:
Specification of a hardware and software architecture (and development of prototype implementations) for a multimodal wireless terminal, capable of exploiting the presence of multiple RATs in the composite radio network.
Development of a management module (Terminal Station Management System – TSMS) that runs at the multimodal terminal and intelligently exploits the versatility offered by the composite radio environment. In particular, TSMS interacts with NSMS below, towards enabling intelligent network selection decisions.
Development of a Network and Service Management System (NSMS) that interfaces with the various RATs and with servers that provide access to enhanced IP services, towards optimal resource management and QoS provisioning.
User-and service-profiling. Development of a QoS framework for use in the project. Development of models and facilities to effectively define, prepare and conduct meaningful experiments on the prototype composite radio platform developed by the project.
Validation of the composite radio concept through an extensive suite of experiments.