Radio resource management distribution in a beyond 3G multi-radio access architecture

Efficient employment of multiple radio access technologies is expected to be an important property of beyond 3G networks. This will put high demands on radio resource management support, both within and in-between radio access technologies. In this paper we discuss how to distribute radio resource management in a multi-radio access network, and identify three main distribution strategies: network centralized, network distributed and finally the option of having multi-access radio resource management located in the terminal. A combination of network distributed and terminal based radio resource management appears to be the best choice for dynamic multi-access radio resource management in most scenarios. Further, relations towards user plane functions are discussed and modeled, and the functionality is mapped to nodes and interfaces of a beyond 3G reference radio access network architecture.