Position location of mobile terminals is one of the key and vital services for enhanced network performance. A variety of services may be offered when position location is deployed, such as emergency-call assistance, fleet management, location-based value added and multimedia services, navigation, stolen vehicle monitoring, improved network management and differential billing. Players in this area, nowadays and worldwide, are trying to integrate positioning techniques that will fulfill related FCC- and ETSI- localization recommendations, yet without exaggerating the network costs. Major European manufacturers have already developed positioning methods, yet none of them have been adopted in a cellular networking environment. In this contribution a novel technique is presented and its performance and compliance with the related standards is evaluated.

In a world where virtually all consumer devices will soon be speaking the same digital language, the ability to connect hardware and distribute content from one box to another creates important opportunities for extending networks into millions of consumer homes; connecting each house to the Internet represent an unprecedented opportunity to increase network traffic and expand the customer base beyond the corporate sphere. This paper outlines the work carried out in InfoGate, a European research and development project under the ESPRIT programme, that designed and implemented a multiservice residential gateway platform. A residential gateway (also called residential concentrator, residential hub, residential communications controller or integrated access device) is, in the most simple terms, a bridge between the access network (or the local loop) which connects to the core network gateways (e.g. Internet) end the home local network. The paper describes the service requirements and focuses on the wireless access and indoor interfaces.

Broadband wireless technology appears to be one of the competitive solutions for the last mile problem. Wireless access systems enable one to incrementally roll out infrastructure and rapidly turn up new services such as high-speed Internet access and video distribution. In this paper, implementation challenges toward an adaptive orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) point-to-multipoint outdoor broadband wireless access system are examined. The frequency band tackled is located at 10.5 GHz but the results can be applied to other areas of the spectrum as well. The targeted bit rates go up to 34 Mbps, for varying channel conditions. Dynamic time division multiple access/time division duplex (DTDMA/TDD) is selected for the medium access scheme, since TDD requires only a single unpaired frequency band (thus reducing the cost for purchasing licensed spectrum), while TDMA distributes the number of slots per uplink or downlink direction according to the traffic that each direction has to transmit. In addition, OFDM techniques provide a robust behavior in the presence of multipath fading. This paper focuses on the wireless data link control (W-DLC) layer, addressing the system protocol stack and all W-DLC sublayers, entities and functions, and providing a framework that will be beneficial for a licensed outdoor wireless system.

In the current ATM LAN emulation (LANE) standard the issues of flow control and bandwidth allocation in the access units have not been adequately addressed. This paper investigates ways to enhance the functionality of typical legacy LAN-ATM access units (AUs) with the addition of low-level flow control mechanisms. The scheme proposed is based on the available bit rate (ABR) control mechanism currently standardized for ATM. Backpressure flow control is not terminated in the AU but is further extended to reach the nonATM legacy LAN stations. This is achieved by using a subset of the logical link control (LLC) protocol functionality executed between the AU and the legacy LAN stations. Apart from the QoS guarantees, the proposed method is transparent to the upper transport layer protocols and as such it does not require fundamental modifications to existing AUs and LAN stations.

The asynchronous transfer mode (ATM)-based broadband integrated services digital network (B-ISDN) dominates the research interest in telecommunications. Traffic and network modeling are the techniques used for performance evaluation and assessment of B-ISDN design alternatives and planning. The specific nature of the ATM technique requires new approaches for traffic modeling. Selecting appropriate traffic source models is an important issue, since it is closely related to the successful design and efficient performance of the networks to be built in the future. The source (multilevel, multiservice structured Markovian) model presented provides a simple way for characterizing the behavior of a telecommunication user recognizing the multilevel discipline of a telecommunication session. The traffic model is general enough to fit a variety of different services by appropriately varying the values of the parameters defining it, but also it is simple enough because it is described by a small number of parameters and the defining parameters make a good intuitive sense by being closely related to actual physical quantities.