Next Generation Wireless Infrastructure

Given the commercial success of wireless technologies that has already taken place over the last couple of decades, with a global mobile communication penetration beyond 3 billion subscribers as well as the enormous success of wireless data communication through IEEE 802.11x and Bluetooth, people could think the wireless revolution is over. However, future connectivity will be wireless and ubiquitous. Therefore the future of wireless infrastructures seems to be in front of a remarkable evolution as this paper will describe. With a vision of creating continuous seamless user connectivity as well as having physical devices/things connected through the wide spread usage of sensor and RFID near field communication technologies the network will increase in size with a order of magnitude compared to today. Additionally having the widespread Internet protocol technologies as a fundamental building block the wireless vision is additionally to create a future wireless ICT environment that can help reduce energy consumption, handle local and global disasters etc. By offering this it is envisioned that wireless ICT can create a base for tackling some of the worlds largest problems using wireless ICT. This paper describes a focused number of research issues to solve in order for this to happen. Completely new disruptive ways of building the architecture is necessary. New ways of thinking where the next level of network intelligence is fundamental, where much more network and device cooperation should be used. New efficient ways of optimizing the spectrum usage are necessary. The extent of IP-based sensor networks with explode due to the rapid evolution in the relationship between processing power, cost, power consumption and physical size.