Generic Architecture and Mechanisms for Protocol Reconfiguration Nancy Alonistioti & Eleni Patouni & Vangelis Gazis # Springer Science + Business Media, LLC 2006 Abstract The next generation of wireless mobile communications termed beyond 3G (or 4G), will be based on a heterogeneous infrastructure that com- prises different wireless networks in a complementary manner. Beyond 3G will introduce reconfiguration capabilities to flexibly and dynamically (i.e., during operation) adapt the wireless protocol stacks to better meet the ever-changing service requirements. For the dynamic reconfiguration of protocol stacks during runtime operation to become a practical capability of mobile communication systems, it is necessary to establish a software architecture that functionally supports reconfiguration. In the present paper, a generic architecture and respective mechanisms to achieve protocol stack and component based protocol layer reconfiguration are proposed. Keywords protocol component . binding . protocol stack . reconfiguration 1 Introduction Over the last decade, mobile communication technolo- gies have spawned a wide gamut of wireless access tech- nologies and systems; those include cellular wireless systems (e.g., GPRS/EDGE/GERAN, UMTS, cdma2000), WLAN type systems (e.g., HIPERLAN/2, IEEE 802.11a/b/g, etc.) broadcast systems (e.g., DAB, DVB) and short range connectivity systems (e.g., Bluetooth). Given that future mobile devices will have to support multiple radio access standards and protocol stacks, reconfiguration has emerged as a key technological en- abler for the convergence of heterogeneous systems, the support of multi-standard mobile systems and joint radio resource management across different spectrum bands. Audacious visions of reconfiguration [1] involve the dynamic modification of the protocol subsystem within operating network elements (e.g., mobile devi- ces, base stations), which extends to the runtime incor- poration of additional protocol stacks. Given the wide disparity in the technical characteristics of wireless equipment, evolution towards fully reconfigurable wireless systems will require a reconfiguration support framework, i.e., a common set of mechanisms which, support reconfiguration procedures on the network infrastructure, including the mobile devices themselves, in a manner that is transparent to their users. The focus of the present paper is on particular design consider- ations that are material to the facilitation of flexible protocol stack formations as well as on the introduction of a generic functional architecture that supports the dynamic synthesis of entire protocol layers through an assembly of elementary protocol components. The rest of the paper is organized as follows: The status of related industry activities and standardization bodies is presented in Section 2, followed by the design consid- erations of reconfigurable protocol stacks in Section 3. Section 4 introduces a generic logical architecture to support protocol stack reconfiguration and Section 5 introduces a generic object-oriented UML model for Mobile Networks and Applications (2006) 11: 917–934 DOI 10.1007/s11036-006-0058-x N. Alonistioti (*) : E. Patouni : V. Gazis Communication Networks Laboratory, Department of Informatics and Telecommunications, University of Athens, 157 84 Athens, Greece e-mail: nancy@di.uoa.gr E. Patouni e-mail: elenip@di.uoa.gr V. Gazis e-mail: gazis@di.uoa.gr