SAILOR   

 

 

 

SAILOR Newsletter

 

SAILOR web site: http://www.ebanet.it/sailor.htm

 

ISSUE 02 - May 2003

 

This newsletter provides updated information on the activities carried out by the SAILOR project that is co-funded

by the IST research programme, Cross Programme Themes, Action Line: IST-2002-5.1.14 of the European Commission: Contract number IST-2001-37266

 

Consortium

 

Participant name

Participant short name

Country

Telespazio  (Project Co-ordinator)

TPZ

Italy

University of Rome

UoR

Italy

Space Engineering

SE

Italy

Eutelis Consult Italia

EUTELIS

Italy

University of Aquila

UNIVAQ

Italy

University of Aachen

AU

Germany

Siemens Austria

SAGO

Austria

Ericsson Hellas

EH

Greece

Integracion y Sistemas de Medida

ISM

Spain

Ascom

ASC

Switzerland

 

Project Objectives and Expected Results

 

The SAILOR project aims at identifying, designing and demonstrating new services, identified by a proper market analysis, making use of innovative functionalities upon an integrated Terrestrial and Satellite UMTS (T‑S‑UMTS) network. This basic work will be developed in cooperation with the major leading European Standardization  groups. In particular, SAILOR is expected to provide inputs and contributions to the Advanced Satellite Mobile Systems S-UMTS task force (ASMS S-UMTS TF), whose economical and technical groups are now working on the issues mentioned above. In particular, SAILOR aims at assuming a guiding role in front of the ASMS S-UMTS TF, providing market scenarios and innovative technical features to support the new identified services and functionalities.

Furthermore, it targets at contributing to the activities of the relevant UMTS ETSI and even 3GPP standardization groups, which are  involved in the development of new market scenarios for the 3G satellite systems and in the adoption of innovative network tools targeted to support these proposed scenarios.

The SAILOR project will also base its activities on the work which is being carried out in other IST projects (in particular, VIRTUOUS and FUTURE, but even ARROWS, GAUSS, BRAHMS, SUITED, GEOCAST, WINE GLASS, etc.)

In conclusion, SAILOR’s final objectives are the guidance of the Advanced Satellite Mobile Systems S-UMTS task force, aiming at the standardization of the designed and experimented innovative functionalities, as well as the development of advanced multimedia services, upon the integrated T-S-UMTS, which can be commercially exploited in a short term.

 

Ongoing Technical Activities

 

The work undertaken in the SAILOR project is divided into the following eight Workpackages:

WP 100 Management

WP 200 Market Analysis

WP 300 Requirements and System Architecture

WP 400 Fully IP Core Network experiment

WP 500 AN Resources Optimization experiment

WP 600 Integration and Test plan

WP 700 Trials

WP 800 Dissemination, standardization, exploitation

 

Workpackages 200 to 700 are the technical workpackages of the project. Workpackages 200 to 500 are currently ongoing. The activities carried out in the period from January to April 2003 are as follows:

 

WP200

Ø      The overall objectives of the work package was well defined. The general idea is to implement new services trying to meet the user requirements both in terms of QoS and expense capabilities.

Ø      Work on the 3G market status and user expectations on 3G services, to use in order to finally define the new service to develop in the framework of the project. Further investigation on market requirements, taking into account the service characterisation and the initial mix selection provided in the first step of the Market Analysis. The key topics of the investigation are user QoS requirements and expense capabilities, service requirements and service selection on user-side parameters.

Ø      Investigation of technical issues related to service characterization with special focus to LCS, multicast, VoIP, Web browsing related services.

 

WP300

Ø      A long analysis concerning the SAILOR system architecture was performed trying to merge all the partners’ proposals, in order to achieve as much as possible the range of activities in this WP. The final architecture to be implemented has been well defined: the project work will be split into two separate activities: the simulation of an UMTS access network, which will be used to test and validate a cellular planning tool, resource management algorithms and multicast procedures; and the emulation  which will be based on the implementation of a S/T-UMTS demonstrator useful to perform a complete test of the innovative SAILOR full IP based CN (the RASN node).

Ø      Key services/applications to be implemented in SAILOR has been described. This implementation should produce both the traffic typologies adopted by the previous FUTURE project (in fact, we have a persistent, significant amount of VoIP traffic, with typical characteristics of conversational class in terms of maximum delay and jitter) and new traffic classes (streaming, background, interactive) generated from no-voice services and with totally different parameters.

Ø      Analysis of the functional/practical interfaces between both WPs, i.e., in/outputs from/to the AN simulators to realise the AN emulator

Ø      Identification of overall SAILOR Demonstrator operations and of distributed functional entities 

Ø      Requirements and overall scenarios for multicasting in an evolved core network based on RASNs

Ø      Requirements and overall scenarios for SIP based mobility management in an evolved core network based on RASNs

Ø      Requirements on the radio access network emulator (RAN-E)

Ø      Interface requirements between building blocks of SAILOR Demonstrator

Ø      Embedding of the RAN-E into the SAILOR Demonstrator

Ø      Proposal for the RAN-E as a traffic emulator of PDCP or IP-PDUs based on SAILOR Protocol Simulator results, allowing to construct the SAILOR system as one tool-chain. (That is, PDUs transferred through the emulator are treated statistically as if they were transferred by a real radio access network).

Ø      Investigation on the Dynamic Access Network Simulator (DANS), which will be applied for the verification, evaluation and optimisation of Radio Resource Management (RRM) procedures such as Call Admission Control (CAC).  Identification of the DANS and the corresponding requirement analysis has been done. A high level architecture of the DANS has been defined. Its interfaces with the Cell Planning Tool (CPT) and the Protocol Simulator have been specified.

Ø      Investigation of multicasting technologies in correlation with mobility management techniques applicable to mobile networks with special focus to the SAILOR framework.

Ø      Investigation of the applicability of SIP and Mobile IP protocol suites for mobility management support in mobile networks.

Ø      Analysing the functional/ practical interfaces between both WPs, i.e., in/outputs from/to the AN simulators to realise the AN emulator

 

WP400

Ø      Co-ordination of the work on “Requirements, Design and Test Specification for CN entities and UE”

Ø      Work on the SAILOR mobility design proposal “SIP over NAS” and RASN re-allocation

Ø      Work on the SAILOR mobility design proposal “SIP as the only signalling protocol for SM/MM and application layer, SIP only”

Ø      Proposal how to cover UMTS Mobility Management procedures by using SIP messages/mechanisms only

Ø      Analysis of Inter RASN Mobility Management

Ø      All the concepts related to the multicast simulator which can be used as an input for the SAILOR emulator have been analysed. The basic idea is that the emulator will use some statistical results which will be caught within the simulations performed by the multicast simulator. The relevant table of contents for the contribution dealing with the above mentioned concepts has been defined. 

Ø      Study for the design of functional requirements for the conversion between NAS and standard UMT protocols and NAS protocols based upon SIP.

Ø      Study of the requirements for the interfaces RANAP and GTP-U in the SAILOR reference system.

Ø      Investigation of the applicability of Mobile IP technologies for the support of terminal mobility for unicast and multicast transport, the extensions of UMTS network nodes relocation procedures for the SAILOR framework and the application of the 3GPP-specified Gn and Gs interfaces in the context of the SAILOR RASN.

Ø      First contributions to the end-to-end functional analysis of SIP based mobility management in an evolved core network based on RASNs

Ø      Draft contribution to functional analysis and design of multicasting in an evolved core network based on RASNs

 

WP 500

Ø      Specification of the AN protocol simulator

Ø      Investigation of the interfaces among WP 400 functionality (Multicast simulator) and the AN Protocol simulator

Ø      Intensive research and SW implementation activities concerning Advanced Connection Admission Control (ACAC) and Cellular Planning Tool (CPT) have been performed. Regarding ACAC, advanced control theory is helping to define new algorithms, to predict traffic demand and interference level. Sophisticated optimization tools are going to be used for the implementation of an advanced CPT in order to guarantee an optimized cellular layout.

Ø      Study of the state of the art in IP multicast services over mobile networks, IPv6 mobility and MBMS latest specifications to derive requirements from multicast services on the SAILOR Core Network.

Ø      A contribution for this first step regards the description of Cellular Planning Tool (CPT) structure and how it will be able to produce optimised cellular layout. Advanced optimisation theory is helping to define both new sophisticated models and algorithms. In the scope of this issue, a SW implementation concerning CPT and Advanced Connection Admission Control (ACAC) has been performed.

Ø      An advanced Call Admission Control Strategy has been designed to be implemented in the protocol simulator. Moreover several simulations have been performed in order to test the efficiency of the designed algorithm and to compare it with other strategies already present in  literature.

Ø      Study of the extensions that need to be developed in the testbed from FUTURE in order to include the network mobility functions at the access required by the SAILOR testbed.

Ø      Provision to WP500 partners of input parameters (BER-SIR curves) obtained as output of SE internal simulation activities to be utilised in the framework of WP500 Protocol Simulator implementation.

Ø      Identification of the experiments to be investigated in WP500. Specification of the simulators and emulators, which are required for the identified experiments. Definition of the basic applications and functional requirements of the Dynamic Access Network Simulator (DANS) and its interfaces with the other components of the simulation/emulation environment. Sketch of the DANS architecture.

Ø      Specification of the physical layer model to be applied in the DANS.

Ø      A further contribution to the work consisted in describing:

(i)                 service aspects of terrestrial and satellite component in UMTS, with particular regard to the integration scenario;

(ii)               problems in radio resource management in an integrated system;

(iii)             strategies for optimised radio resource management by multicast functionality.

As for (i),  the Quality of Service (QoS) requirements have been introduced with particular reference to multicast applications and the benefits of integrated systems have been illustrated from a QoS point of view.

As for (ii), problems arising in multicast applications have been detailed and classified with respect to different working requirements. These include integrated satellite/terrestrial networks and roaming through different networks. Different links physical constraints have also been presented.

As for (iii), several solution strategy have been identified. Thse strategies are based on a graph-oriented representation of the problems allowing the use of combinatorial optimization techniques. Promising models and solution strategies have been presented for both single and multi-session multicast problems.

 

Publications

 

Ø      A paper entitled “SAILOR project general architecture: simulation and emulation of an integrated T/S-UMTS system based on an innovative fully IP core network” was submitted to the IST Mobile Summit 2003 conference and to the to the ASMS Task Force conference.

Ø      A paper about Cellular Planning Tool, for the next COST273 meeting (May 2003), is in progress.

Ø      Preparation of a paper on CAC issues, to be presented at a major international conference or review

 

Conferences and Workshops

 

Ø      ASMS Task Force Meeting in Madrid on 29/30.01.03

Ø      Workshop in EC IST Mobile 3G on 29.04.03

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The next issue of the SAILOR Newsletter will be available mid-September 2003

 

Project Coordinator (contact point) :

Arnoldo Giralda   TELESPAZIO   Via Tiburtina, 965 - 00156 Rome - Italy

Tel.: +39-06 4079 3745 Fax: +39-06 4079 3843  E-mail: Arnoldo_Giralda@telespazio.it