A Trip up the Protocol Stack

Joseph Mitola III

      This Radio Communications Supplement (RCS) takes a trip up the protocol stack from physical bandwidth sharing to mobility management in an all-IP network, then to security, and finally to a mobility-enabling platform, the high altitude platform (HAP) airship. Lee Pucker's column looks at multichannel architectures that characterize cellular and other radio communications infrastructure systems.
      The "Bandwidth Sharing Approach to Improve Licensed Spectrum Utilization" developed by Papadimitratos, Sankaranarayanan, and Mishra of Virginia Tech goes beyond the mere physical layer with a complete ad hoc secondary spectrum access protocol compatible with a Global System for Mobile Communications (GSM) primary user, a technical idea sure to engender serious thought on the part of those who paid big bucks for the spectrum licenses. Although the IEEE focuses on technology and not the business case, we regularly publish technical papers directly related to business cases, such as the many technical treatments of user needs. Here we have a convincing technical story about how ad hoc networks could (peacefully?) coexist with typically overused spectrum, in its periods of less than peak use, of course.
      Colleagues Masami Yabusaki, Takatoshi Okagawa, and Kazuo Imai of innovator NTT DoCoMo take another look at how the mobile telecommunication network is morphing into an all-IP mobile network with diversified radio access systems. Their article "Mobility Management in All-IP Mobile Network: Endo-to-End Intelligence or Network Intelligence?" explores candidate strategies for mobility management, with a detailed discussion of mobility management protocols and some basic results from their testbed, carefully articulating the question of how to structure mobility management.
      Bandwidth sharing and increased mobility may create new applications for the Extensible Authentication Protocol (EAP). The article "EAP and IEEE 802.1x: Tutorial and Empirical Experience" by Jyh-Cheng Chen and Yu-Ping Wang develops the authentication paradigm with sufficient detail in the message sequences to consider the security implications of extreme mobility.
      To complete the supplement, "Integrated Satellite-HAP Systems" examines hybrid airship-satellite architectures as enablers for future high-capacity systems. Cianca and Prasad of Aalborg University, Denmark, team up with De Sanctis, De Luise, Antonini, Teotino, and Ruggieri of the University of Rome "Tor Vergata" to consider the technical features and new levels of capability offered by such an architecture.
      The editorial board would like to thank the authors for these cutting edge contributions and thank you, the readers, for your continued interest in the RCS. We always appreciate your feedback and suggestions for future topics for the RCS.
      Best regards from the RCS Editorial Board.

Joe Mitola, The Mitre Corporation
Friedrich Jondral, University of Karlsruhe
Ryuji Kohno, Yokohama National University
Walter Tuttlebee, Virt. Cent. Exc. in Mobile & Pers. Commun.
Zoran Zvonar, Analog Devices, Inc.