The drastic growth of mobile traffic greatly challenges the capacity of mobile infrastructures. Dense deployment of low-power small cells helps alleviate the congestion in the radio access network, yet it also introduces large complexity for network management. Software-defined radio access network has been proposed to tackle the added complexity. However, existing software-defined solutions re...

A key word describing next-generation wireless communications, so called 4G, is “seamless.” As part of the e-Japan Plan promoted by the Japanese Government, the MIRAI (Multimedia Integrated network by Radio Access Innovation) project is aiming at the development of new technologies that will enable seamless integration of various wireless access systems for practical use by 2005. First, this pa...

The integration of wireless LANs (WLANs) and 3G systems performed at core network level requires very little modifications to the current 3GPP architecture and provides a large set of benefits: seamless service integration, exploration of user mobility by applications, seamless use of different radio access network (RANs), easy availability of current services such as Short Message Service (SMS...

A key word describing next-generation wireless communications, so called 4G, is “seamless.” As part of the eJapan Plan promoted by the Japanese Government, the MIRAI (Multimedia Integrated network by Radio Access Innovation) project is aiming at the development of new technologies that will enable seamless integration of various wireless access systems for practical use by 2005. First, this pap...