Consumer-oriented incoming call connection service for the ubiquitous consumer wireless world

This thesis proposes a novel consumer-oriented Incoming Call Connection (ICC) service as an important enabling infrastructural component of the recently proposed ubiquitous consumer wireless world (UCWW), a new Consumer-centric Business Model (CBM) environment for wireless communications. The ICC solution proposed here will be offered by third-party providers who are autonomous of the access network providers. Compared to the present ICC service in the legacy subscriber-based networks, the consumeroriented ICC service will offer to mobile users greater flexibility and management control over incoming calls, enable users to receive incoming calls via multiple access networks/providers by means of a single identity, support user-driven, seamless, network-transparent Hot Access network Change (HAC), largely eliminate roaming charges and develop a new wireless networking business opportunity among other benefits. This thesis advocates for a coming paradigm change from the existing ICC service established on the Subscriber-based Business Model (SBM-ICC) towards the CBM-based ICC (CBM-ICC) service. The investigation, design and implementation of all the protocols and other elements required for building the CBM-ICC service especially in terms of transport, signaling and mobility support are addressed. The existence of other key UCWW infrastructural components of third-party authentication, authorization and accounting (3P-AAA) service provision, IPv6 personal address, and service offerings advertisements over wireless billboard channels (WBCs) is assumed. An architecture and protocol infrastructure for the CBMICC service is elaborated. Components and interfaces relying upon existing protocols or requiring new signaling protocols (or modification/new elements of existing protocols) are identified and for the latter solutions are suggested. The concept of user-driven HAC is promoted and described. The introduction of the Stream Control Transmission Protocol (SCTP) as a potential solution for enabling this HAC is motivated. Furthermore, the thesis elaborates a generic CBM-ICC service scenario, which shows how the CBM-ICC service offers to mobile users greater freedom and operation control over incoming calls, enables the novel attribute of users being empowered to receive incoming calls simultaneously, and otherwise, from various homogeneous and heterogeneous access networks, owned by the same or different providers, and enables user-driven HAC on active calls in keeping with, or matched to, user’s Always Best Connected and Best Served (ABC&S) policies. A CBM-ICC proof-of-concept system-level testbed is implemented to perform experimental tests, probe different communications scenarios, evaluate the service performance, and further elaborate the service architecture. In this, approaches towards evaluating the performance of the CBM-ICC service based on designed testbed are elaborated, and sample numerical results are presented and analyzed.