FUTURE RESEARCH DIRECTIONS

Untraditional routing algorithms remain an open field for future applications and networks. New research can seek to integrate different routing mechanisms, or improve the untraditional algorithms, or yet to develop new routing proposals based on such social, biological and epidemic concepts. For example, there is a limited routing experience based on the Wasp model which may also be applied in the allocation of radio resources when there are multiple interfaces, as well as the optimization of routing and selection of networks.

The social model was presented as a way to extract the relationship and mobility pattern in order to improve the security and optimization over routing. Another interesting issue, not presented here, is with regard to building negotiation models. What information should be used to negotiate the communication between social networks? How to negotiate and apply policy routing among theses environment?

Although this chapter presented and evaluated a number of non-traditional routing stratégie s that future 4G networks could dwell from, there is still a considerable need for more studies of routing stimulus. This could be especially important for the integration of different 4G environments that internally may work with varying routing algorithms. For this reason, future work should seek to make a better analysis of some of the proposed routing ideas such as diffusion, chemotaxy, stigmergy and percolation. Such evaluations should be more complete in looking for the behavior of each algorithm in different 4G environments, including as disruptive network, delay tolerant network, short-range network, disaster recovery and overlay network. Moreover, new mathematical and possibly better calibrated models should accurately describe the result of blending and breeding this new class of routing algorithms.

A deeper knowledge of stimulus could be a first step to define a new policy architecture to control and manage future 4G networks. Further, work is also needed to understand the impact of policies on stimulus in order to enable their dynamic adjusting and routing customization. One expects to see studies showing how these classes of routing protocols may be calibrated and taken advantage of to suit different operating environments and requirements.

WBC and ADA | FUTURE RESEARCH

• At the WBC Service Layer - Besides the intelligent software architecture already mentioned, other issues for future investigation include:
  
  
  • Agent environment: JADE has been used to date to act as an agent environment in the heterogeneous WBC software architecture. However, JADE is a heavy agent platform with a big footprint for executing both the SD collecting, clustering, scheduling, indexing, broadcasting on the server side, and the SD discovery and association on the mobile terminal side. In addition, it does not fully support the BDI agent. Therefore, investigation into lightweight BDI-based Java agent platforms (WBC-BDI) is recommended. Formatting the communication language's messages with WBC-ASN is also recommended, as well as ensuring that the agent platform functions correctly in the following environments: J2SE (Sun Java 2 platform, standard edition 2003), J2ME (Sun J2ME Specification 2009), Android (Google Android Software Development Kit 2008), WinCE (Windows Embedded CE Overview 2008), etc.
    
    
  • SD formatting: In order to encode SDs in a more compact way, an efficient abstract syntax notation language based on ASN.1 (WBC-ASN) is suggested. Any design should take into account the requirement for minimizing decoder's power consumption.
    
    
  • Rule engine: Resolution of the need to improve the flexibility and scalability could be approached by designing an intelligent SD self-organization lightweight Java rule engine. In suggesting this, we also recommend that the rules configuration file here could be defined with WBC-ASN.
    
    
  • ADP: Designing with system scalability in mind, the route of developing the ADP protocol in Java, together with a Java-based Reed-Solomon algorithm being fully implemented is suggested as worthy of investigation.
    
    
  • Profile design: To increase security and privacy for WBC-SPs, and mobility and personalization for mobile users, investigation of the benefits from this perspective of a well-structured rule-based profile developed and formatted with WBC-ASN is suggested.
    
    
• At the WBC Link Layer and Physical Layer - Potential broadcast platform solutions include WBC over DVB-H, over DRM, over DAB, etc. Investigations in the technical realization configurations for each have yet to be undertaken. There is little doubt about the potential consumer base into which WBC advertisement may be pushed. Today, for instance, there is an expectation of 300 million DVB-H capable handsets operational by 2009/10.

3P-AAA and 3P-C&B | FUTURE RESEARCH

• Extending 3P-AAA into the area of wireless Ad Hoc networks. This can yield significant 3P-AAA use cases influencing the 3P-C&B requirements. Typical Ad Hoc domain scenarios involving hot-zone wireless heterogeneous architectures are envisaged where mobile terminals use multi-hop techniques to get to a hot zone using intermediate mobile terminals (the latter should benefit from their role in such scenarios, i.e., be paid properly).
  
  
• Research to date has identified and established the basic charging scenarios in CBM-based UCWW by employing inter-3P-AAA-SP signalling. However, when the inter-3P-AAA-SP signalling involves Internet usage, then charging interactions can experience high network latency. To eliminate this problem either further optimization is needed in the 3P-AAA-SP signalling (i.e., compressing the messages where possible) or a new ‘charging agent’ concept should be developed. This new concept would result in the following: (1) the charging occurs in the metering domain (TSP/ANP), (2) the charging agent is downloaded from the 3P-AAA-SP to provide the charging function in the TSP/ANP domain, (3) the charging agent imports the charging rule set from the 3P-AAA-SP, (4) the charging agent imports segments of the consumer account into the metering domain.
  
  
• Elaboration of the C&B framework to support dynamic reconfiguration of applicable metering and pricing policies for specific service, specific user or combination of both, and to support various pricing models according to the service profile, user profile and location, and one-stop billing schemes.
  
  
• Implementation of a C&B system prototype as a discrete service that can be provided by a trusted third-party authentication, authorization and accounting service providers (3P-AAA-SPs).
  
  
• Running trial experiments with the designed prototype in a 4G testbed environment showing good interfacing with the 3P-AAA service, WBC&ADA services, and other (new) types of 4G services (e.g., consumer-oriented ICC service).