Packet-based cellular systems with overprovisioned IP backbone

Next generation cellular systems will be mostly data oriented. Current circuit switching will not be effective for such systems and there will be a need for increased packet switching based on the IP networking. In this paper a radical approach is studied in which all traffic in cellular system would be based on IP packets. Cellular systems data transfer capacity is limited by the radio links from base stations which can be considered as traffic control gateways. It is shown that this makes possible to build an IP backbone network with overprovisioned traffic capacity with respect to radio access base station gateways. Proper design of such network will ensure that there will be no necessity for resource reservation and all traffic control will be done in the base stations. Issues related to the design and operation of such network are studied