Deliverable 06 is final: FINAL REPORT of the SMONET-NGNI project activity

The increasing availability of wire-less and wire-lined network technologies with different properties combined the rise of Internet compatible, multi-hop, ad-hoc networks will lead to the creation of a integrated network platforms. The demonstration of such a platform and the investigation of research issues related to efficiency, cost and a highest possible degree of transparency for the user comprise the first research area of NGN.

The second research area concerns the study of issues of service discovery and provision over integrated network platform described previously. Existing service discovery standards were designed for use in intranet environments and are thus inappropriate for use in an integrated environment of global scale. Issues to be investigated include overcoming the heterogeneous nature of multi-service networks for the provision of transparent service discovery as well as mechanisms for automatically configuring elaborate request service packages.

Finally NGN will investigate methods for the introduction of user profiling, personalisation data and positioning systems data in the investigated service discovery mechanisms. It is noted that compatibility with existing standards for service discovery is imperative to achieve industry acceptance. Main research issues to be investigated in this area are open simple and human readable languages based on powerful meta-data mechanisms that are platform-independent and machine readable to allow for easy machine-to-machine communication.

Therefore, the following relevance to benchmarks, roadmaps, and standards are available:

• Mobile technology is evolving in all directions and all have their own market share
• From consumer point-of-view, it is important to have service provision at the lowest cost and good performance
• So, services should be able to choose the appropriate networks without the users knowledge of technologies
• Also, interworking and interoperability issues have to be addressed in NGN discussions
• The project proposes to deliver benchmark report of possible scenarios and the technologies spectrum that can be integrated into one platform

This deliverable is devided into the sections user requirements, market situation, integrated network platform, service discovery platform, and the roadmap. This results are coming from the work of SMONET-NGNI, European projects, and the different standardisation activities. We tried to summarised the results in this document, but we have not mentioned all content of the project in this deliverable. Therefore, also the other five deliverables could be interested for Next Generation Networks (NGN).