Heterogeneous and opportunistic wireless networks

Abstract

Recent years have witnessed the evolution of a large plethora of wireless technologies with different characteristics, as a response of the operators' and users' needs in terms of an efficient and ubiquitous delivery of advanced multimedia services. The wireless segment of network infrastructure has penetrated in our lives, and wireless connectivity has now reached a state where it is considered to be an indispensable service as electricity or water supply. Wireless data networks grow increasingly complex as a multiplicity of wireless information terminals with sophisticated capabilities get embedded in the infrastructure.When looking at the horizon of the next decades, even more significant changes are expected, bringing the wireless world closer and closer to our daily life, which will definitely pose new challenges in the design of future wireless networks. In the following sections, a vision is briefly described on some of the envisaged elements that will guide this evolution, and that will definitely impact of the design of the network layers of wireless networks.In particular, and addressing a shorter term perspective, the paper starts in Section 1 with the implications of network heterogeneity on how wireless networks will be operated and perceived by the users, with the corresponding requirements for smart radio resource management strategies. Then, Section 2 will address the concept of self-organising networks, since it is expected that, due to the increase in complexity in future networks, together with the huge amount of parameters to be tuned for network optimisation, mechanisms are established to allow the self-configuration of a wireless network with minimum human intervention. Going a step further from the more classical cellular networks and their evolutions, the next sections address other types of wireless communications networks that are also envisaged to arise