Rising to the Challenge of Managing Bandwidth

PhysOrg.com on March 29, 2006

This piece describes an ongoing European effort to confront a scarcity of bandwidth for 3G applications. If the challenge isn't handled adequately, end-user voice and data performance will be impaired. The EVEREST project uses Radio Resource Management (RRM) techniques to develop and test advanced algorithms to better handle bandwidth aimed at applications as simple as voice and e-mail and as robust as video streaming, multimedia, video conferencing and mobile television. The goal is to mediate the available spectrum to support those applications while ensuring end-to-end Quality of Service (QoS). RRM is described as a service prioritization technique that puts some services and clients ahead of others. EVEREST takes this a step further by delegating different types of applications to different networks. Thus, a phone call can run on a GSM network, while a video conference gets access to a higher-capacity Universal Mobile Telecommunications Service (UMTS) platform.