Key Research Issues in 4th Generation Wireless Infrastructures

The world of communication is now developing faster than ever. Telecommunication infrastructure deployment in contrast is a slow and costly process demanding a long-range strategic perspective in decision making. As a consequence, R&D efforts are concerned with problems on a time horizon of 10 years or more. Studying the feasibility and viability of various future infrastructure architectures and potential road-maps of their deployment is the focus for the 4 Generation Wireless Infrastructures project within PCC. Determining technological and other bottlenecks to find key areas for research in this area is a very important element in these studies. The methods used for this purpose are various scenario techniques. Plausible scenarios, describing the telecommunication scene in 2010, have been designed based on a number of global trends in technology, economy and politics. The scenario trends have also been verified by using a Delphi survey among leading industrials and scientists in Sweden. Based on these trends, three vivid scenarios are built which implicitly describe the different trends that have been created, for instance, the Big Brother, the Anything Goes, and the Pocket Computing. At the end of the paper, the implications of the scenarios to the infrastructure research areas are discussed. In particular, the working assumptions and key research problems in each PCC/4GW work package are revisited and prioritized according to the scenarios. The scenarios are also proposed to provide a framework for inter-relating different research activities within PCC.