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WIRELESS WORLD RESEARCH FORUM INTRODUCTIONBeyond-third-generation (B3G) systems have been envisaged as an evolution and convergence of mobile communications systems and IP technologies to offer a multitude of services over a variety of access technologies. To fulfill the vision, it is necessary to understand the requirements with respect to the support of heterogeneity in network accesses, communication services, mobility, user devices, and so on. It is equally important to promote the necessary research in networking technology by providing a guiding framework of research areas and technical issues with priority. The new architectures and technologies will have to address the fundamental assumptions and requirements that govern the design. All these are being tackled by the Cooperative Network working group (CoNet) of the Wireless World Research Forum (WWRF), which is working on a series of white papers outlining B3G visions and roadmap, architectural principles, research challenges, and candidate approaches. In the remainder of this article CoNet's main objectives are outlined, while we examine the most important elements of CoNet's architectural principles. Additionally, we address the flamboyant research challenges in cooperative networks and try to give a glimpse of what we think would govern their design and encompass their futuristic form by introducing the main network components and technologies. This is mainly accomplished by focusing on three "hot concepts": mobility management, multiple access, and moving networks. ABSTRACTBeyond-3G (B3G) systems have been envisaged as an evolution and conv∂ ergence of mobile/wireless communication systems and IP technologies to offer a multitude of services over a variety of access technologies. To fulfill the vision, it is necessary to understand the requirements with respect to the support of heterogeneity in network accesses, communication services, mobility, user devices, and so on. Besides, it is equally important to promote the necessary research in networking technology by providing a guiding framework of research areas and technical issues with priority. The new architectures and technologies will have to address the fundamental assumptions and requirements that govern the design. All these issues are being tackled by the Cooperative Network working group (CoNet) of WWRF; the group is working on a series of white papers outlining B3G visions and roadmap, architectural principles, research challenges, and candidate approaches. This article outlines the CoNet concept, architectural principles, and guidelines for research into cooperative networks assuming that the B3G systems will be built over generic IP networking technologies. The article also presents the key research challenges, research framework, and major network components and technologies. The key points are that the system should be layered on demand, encourage reuse of independent modularized functional blocks, support multiple services and service creation, ensure consistent end-to-end connectivi...

Providing end-to-end communication in heterogeneous internetworking environments is a challenge. Two fundamental problems are bridging between different internetworking technologies and hiding of network complexity and differences from both applications and application developers. This paper presents abstraction and naming mechanisms that address these challenges in the Ambient Networks project. Connectivity abstractions hide the differences of heterogeneous internetworking technologies and enable applications to operate across them. A common naming framework enables end-to-end communication across otherwise independent internetworks and supports advanced networking capabilities, such as indirection or delegation, through dynamic bindings between named entities. 1

-An increasingly wireless world faces new challenges due to the dynamicity of interactions, range of applications, multitude of available radio access technologies and network functionality. The Ambient Networks project recognizes these trends and enables the creation of innovative network solutions for mobile and wireless systems beyond 3G. These networks will enable scalable and affordable wireless networking while providing pervasive, rich and easy-to-use communication. A specific focus lies on enabling advanced capabilities in environments with increased competition as well as cooperation, environments that are populated by a multitude of user devices, wireless technologies, network operators and business actors. The project adopts a modular architecture that enables plug-and-play control extensibility that supports a wide range of different applications and network technologies. Based on a small subset of common functionality, this approach supports the dynamic deployment of advanced internetworking capabilities, such as media-and contextawareness or multi-radio access.

1Ambient Networks interconnect independent realms that may use different local network technologies and may belong to different administrative or legal entities. At the core of these advanced internetworking concepts is a flexible naming architecture based on dynamic indirections between names, addresses and identities. This paper gives an overview of the connectivity abstractions of Ambient Networks and then describes its naming architecture in detail, comparing and contrasting them to other related nextgeneration network architectures.