Written by: Göran A.P. Eriksson, Birgitta Olin, Krister Svanbro and Dalibor Turina

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Much as second-generation radio access brought mobile telephony capabilities to the mass market, third-generation radio-access technology will introduce value that extends beyond basic telephony. The widespread growth of the Internet has created a mass market for multimedia and information services. The challenge of providing this access is twofold: from the market perspective, the challenge is to merge the installed base of users in cellular and Internet environments; in terms of technology, the challenge is to find common denominators for cellular solutions on one side, and efficient Internet access on the other. To successfully meet these challenges, the third-generation wireless systems must be designed to offer a multitude of services, provide considerable flexibility, structured QoS handling, and cost-effective access, while ensuring coverage with high radio spectrum efficiency.

These design challenges need to be resolved in the future evolution of UMTS and EDGE standards, beginning with the standardization of release 2000 in ETSI/3GPP, both regarding the radio-access networks and the common core network. A common denominator for this evolution is the Internet protocol suite, which provides end-to-end solutions for transport and network communication, including cellular (radio) access links over UMTS/EDGE. The authors describe the requirements and current trends in the evolution of the third-generation wireless systems toward supporting more generic multimedia applications on a common platform. More especially, they discuss the challenges and solutions involved in designing a packet-switched radio-access network that efficiently supports VoIP service, highlighting session control for VoIP service, quality-of-cellular service for the cellular link, and the challenges of VoIP over wireless.

[First published in Ericsson Review no. 01, 2000]