Service Advertisements for Fourth Generation Mobile Networks

Fourth generation mobile communication networks are characterised by heterogeneous access networks and IP based transport technologies. Heterogeneous access across networks provide great flexibility in selecting services based on user requirements but such access poses great challenges. Heterogeneous access enables mobility users to control the handover process and decide on which network to handed-over to. Future mobility networks would cater for various access mechanisms and operators would vary in terms of coverage and access technology. Support of multiple-operators requires efficient service advertisement mechanisms. We propose a hierarchical operator independent service discovery data repository which is independent of the service discovery access mechanism, but capable of enabling location based, specialised, discrete QoS and cost based searches. The repository is a novel idea that enables users to explore services based on their requirements