To achieve seamless global mobility, we will develop means of interaction at the application, network management and physical layers of a 3G cellular system with wireless local and personal area networks. This will enable service providers to deliver a wide variety of mobile applications at the most appropriate network tier, and enable subscribers to efficiently access these services anywhere, anytime and with any end user device.

Today's telecommunication networks are dominantly isolated or interconnected very loosely. The emerging global telecommunications network environment will be a fully and tightly interconnected topology of hierarchical networks offering a seamless roaming capability that lets users access any network anywhere and anytime with any end user device. The majority of our R&D centers around a heterogeneous next-generation multi-tier test network infrastructure that integrates three tiers, 3G 1xEV wireless cellular network, wireless local area networks (802.11) and wireless personal area networks (802.15). All three tiers are vertically interconnected by gateways/routers, and allow for the convergence of network services at the IP layer. This test bed serves as a unique environment for the following research related to Technology Push and Application Pull:

Communication hotspots avoid the depletion of costly 3G resources by redirecting broadband services to local networks where available so that users are always best connected (ABC). We will focus on the development of technology for hotspot integration into 3G networks to build mobile and fixed hotspots for both remote distribution and local high-density broadband services. QoS-enabling hand-off mechanisms will be investigated for inter-tier hand-off processes (Dr. Bernd Kurz, Computer Science at UNB).

Quality delivery of multi-media streams for mobile applications requires end-to-end control of quality of service (QoS). We will investigate the alternatives for providing appropriate QoS for delivery of multimedia streams over Internet paths that include one or more wireless links (Prof. John. DeDourek, Computer Science at UNB).

When globally roaming across networks of different types, personal mobility using any device with the same feel-and-touch user interface will increase user satisfaction. We will develop and implement enablers for seamless mobility of user and devices using universal name and single-account authentication with global reachability. The tools for this are session establishment and managment by the Session Initiation Protocol (SIP), IP address management by mobile (MoIP), and a virtual home environment (VHE) on Smartcard for global access to subscribed services (Dr. Bernd Kurz, Computer Science at UNB).

As an alternative to today's centralized networks, extensive research will be conducted into mesh and mobile ad hoc networks. This will include extensions to the novel unicast (Cartesian) routing protocol to support broadcast and unicast QoS (fault-tolerance) in mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs). Work will focus on issues of multicast, congestion control, and router design and efficient Cartesian ad hoc routing protocols (CARP) with restricted flooding adaptable to node density, as well as on security. The benefits include a reduction in bandwidth, traffic and node processing requirements, and prepare for the migration from centralized to decentralized public communication networks (Dr. Larry Hughes, Electrical and Computer Engineering at Dalhousie University).

Research work in physical layer communications will promote an improvement of established practices in the design and manufacture of wireless systems, leading to a simplification of receiver architectures. Hardware asymmetry will be introduced by a move of complexity from the mobiles to the base station that relocates the cost from consumer-side mobile to network-side base station with an overall cost reduction as there are many more mobiles than base stations. Consequently, mobiles become more affordable, which will advance the proliferation of wireless communications (Dr. Brent Petersen, Dr. Anthony Brown, Dr. Bruce Colpitts, Prof. Mary Kaye, Electrical and Computer Engineering at UNB).

A major thrust in exploiting the Application Pull for the advancement of wireless communications addresses the environment in which mobile applications operate. Today's applications with static content are not suitable for a dynamic communications context with resource-constrained end user devices and bandwidth-limited wireless access networks. An efficient context-aware delivery of applications by content adaptation, tailored to user preferences, end user device and network condition will be developed and implemented. Single-source authored applications for all contexts will exclusively be used, and an effective definition of representation of these applications will be researched and developed. The benefits include bandwidth conservation, low-maintenance single-source application authoring and improved user satisfaction. To faciliate single-source authoring of web pages, a multi-context web page authoring tool will be developed. (Dr. Bernd Kurz, Computer Science at UNB).

In cooperation with

[Last Revised: 2006 September 28]