Wireless IP NEtwork As a Generic Platform For Location Aware Service Support

The IST WINEGLASS project aimed to exploit IP-based techniques to support mobility and soft-guaranteed QoS, in a wireless Internet architecture incorporating UMTS (3GPP) and WLAN access networks in the same "framework". The main purpose was to explore the potential of this framework in enabling location- and QoS-aware application services for wireless mobile users.

On the other hand, it is well known that a set of brand-new services were envisaged the future mobile communication systems to exploit the potential, in terms of bandwidth and flexibility, of the advanced  mobile access networks. That is, the UMTS system must not only support voice but also high quality images and video together with non-real-time background traffic. Therefore, managing the problems derived from such a mixture of traffic classes revealing different bit rates, services and quality requirements, became mandatory. In that context, from the viewpoint of the UTRAN access network, two main issues were addressed:

•  To study innovative Radio Resource Management (RMM) techniques including new scheduling algorithms to cope with the QoS requirements.
• To implement some kind of testbed, understood as a flexible HW/SW platform able to be configured in different ways, which allows experimental evaluation of the proposed RRM algorithms and techniques.