Prototyping Environment for Equipment Reconfiguration Management and Control

The course of events in the wireless communications area has driven the research towards the beyond third generation (B3G) systems. The B3G concept leans on the coexistence and co-operation of multiple, dissimilar radio access technologies (RATs). The reconfigurability concept has been developed to accommodate and exploit the advantages offered by B3G systems. Reconfigurability supports the B3G concept by providing equipment (terminals and network elements) with capabilities to dynamically select and adapt to the most appropriate RAT. In order for this to be realised, an enhanced equipment management and control functionality should be introduced. Such architecture is presented on this paper that focuses on the prototyping environment and the functional entities of the equipment reconfiguration management and control architecture. Also, the correlation between the concept of autonomic computing and this architecture is presented.