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SUMMARYFuture mobile radio networks will aim at achieving 'broadband access for all', anywhere. The performance of a radio network vitally depends on the characteristics of the transmission path between the user terminal and the access point and the degree of network coverage. In urban areas, full broadband radio coverage is difficult to provide, causing a high variation in the link quality and making broadband services hard to realize. In rural regions, massive deployment costs prevent a full broadband coverage. Most of the time users have to settle for UMTS-like wide area networks. For mobile users accessing services, such as video streaming, which require continuous broadband connectivity, it virtually results in intermittent network connectivity. The frequent disruption of the broadband link and its replacement with no or only low-performance connections is a problem that should be addressed. This article introduces a new technique called Smart Caching (SC), which is able to mitigate variations in the network performance so that non-real-time and non-interactive services' quality is substantially improved.SC supports pre-fetching from a server and buffering data at the edge of the core network, in the so-called Smart Cache. It transmits data with extremely high speed to be buffered in the mobile terminal when it is in the service range of an access point. This allows for the provisioning of data-intensive services even in the case of patchy wireless broadband network coverage and intermittent connectivity.The performance of the SC service is evaluated with two different sophisticated queuing models, both based on the Markov arrival process. The benefit of the new technique is discussed and dimensioning issues are outlined. Furthermore, a comparison with legacy network setups is given.

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