RAD Solutions

(from the RAD website)

A major evolution in the way in which services are provisioned is now taking place in the communications industry.

Traditionally, services have been associated with a location, a type of terminal and a given access technology (for example, groupware installed on an office computer that’s connected to a LAN; analog television received on a home TV set connected to a terrestrial antenna; voice services as far as a mobile signal can reach from the closest GSM antenna, etc.).

With the advent of the millennium, the process began of moving towards ubiquitous service availability and a global seamless mobility of services across different frontiers, including types of terminals, technologies and administrative domains. Moreover, services are converging. The fixed and mobile convergence that we see today is just a first step towards a world in which service components offered by different providers will be dynamically associated to create personalized services. Such personalized services will be both location and context-aware, and they will be ubiquitous.

Ubiquity means that services will be available everywhere. This goal will be supported by a variety of access technologies, among which are xDSL, FTTx, wireless (WiFi, WiMAX), cellular (2G, 3G and beyond), satellite, cable, etc.

As far as the user is concerned, this diversity will be transparent and, in order to reduce costs, those technologies will be backhauled over a reduced number of virtualized infrastructures based on a very small number of technologies. This environment will give rise to new business models between service and network providers. Management of these architectures will become increasingly complex, and that will impose new paradigms for monitoring network behavior, which will include an adaptive local self-reconfiguration without requiring centralized decisions. Traffic flows will be treated in a more intelligent fashion than current schemes of prioritization and separation provide.

Self-organization, for example, allows WiFi access points to discover each other and spontaneously create a network. Using this approach, only a few access points have to be connected to the Internet to cover an entire neighborhood, since a self-organized network will provide the required coverage. The Last Mile, once the sole domain of the operator, will, therefore, eventually fall under the control of the end user, while the service provider offers integration, operation, administration, and maintenance facilities for inter-connecting networks of networks.

But the future promises an even greater expansion of heterogeneous network presence as more and more objects begin to communicate with each other in the public space. Every electronics gadget in the environment will have a radio link in order to provide identification and location information, transmit sensor data and receive control signals. An Internet of objects will have been born.

This evolutionary process will have a significant impact on the various technologies that will have to interwork, on control and management approaches, as well as on traffic structure. Driven by ubiquitous service delivery and heterogeneous network presence, compounded by the proliferation of private network entities, tomorrow’s access networks will require an exponential increase in backhaul capacity. Solutions to achieve this at cost and performance levels that simultaneously ensure profitability and customer satisfaction can only be provided by vendors with an intimate familiarity with the entire spectrum of technologies that tomorrow’s networks will be called upon to support. This is the RAD advantage