Title: Metro-Ethernet-based Mobilie Wireless Cellular Network Architecture: 
Scalability, Mobility, Interoperability and Minimizing Standards Dependency


Authors: Byoung-Jo “J” Kim, N. K. Shankar, Yanjun Sun


Abstract:

The wide-area wireless networks rely on specifications from organizations such
as 3GPP, 3GPP2, and WiMAX Forum. These go beyond the air interfaces and
encompass network protocols for interconnecting base stations(BS) to wired
access networks while providing dynamic traffic forwarding for layer 2 and 3
mobility, generally involving special tunneling protocols between BS and 
centralized gateways.

Operators have a natural preference for competitive and interoperable market for 
BS and other network-side components. To that end, there is extensive standards 
work that specifies components with standardized interfaces (e.g. 3GPP specifies 
node B, SGSN, GGSN. WiMAX Forum specifies BS, ASN gateway, all specific to their 
wireless technologies). Despite this, it is still a common occurrence that a 
single vendor provides all components used in a region, such as BS, gateway, 
mobility managers, paging managers, etc.

Besides the obvious market forces that are involved, we believe that complexity 
of specifications directly increases the barriers to interoperability and 
competition. The complexity is often justified by performance and other benefits 
that are difficult to validate due to lack of counter examples, deployments, or 
independent studies. Often-claimed barriers to using simpler methods are 
scalability and performance.

This paper describes our attempt at constructing a counter example using 
simulations. We have focused on using existing metro Ethernet technologies and 
common IP protocols. The initial goal is to examine if high speed layer 2 
handoffs and dormant mode mobile station paging can be done in a scalable manner 
without additional wireless-specific network components except base stations.