Path Towards Network Convergence and Challenges

Abstract

The emerging trends in the market place are driving towards convergence at device, network, and application levels. Today consumers are looking for a single device capable of fulfilling their daily communication, computing, and personal productivity application needs. Businesses are working tirelessly to offer enhanced quality of service and application portability to consumers irrespective of their locality, mobility, and system preferences. These user preferences squarely challenge existence of stovepipe platforms, islands of interoperable systems, centralized command and control structure, and fragmented connectivity landscape. The new paradigm is all about being technology, platform, operating system, and network agnostic. There are clear indications, which confirms this transformation - e.g. connectivity migrating form circuit switched to packet switched, system resources and application transitioning from centralized to distributed (e.g. thin client, P2P), applications becoming platform and operating systems agnostic (e.g. Java applets), fixed and mobile convergence (IP centric - IMS), and aggregation of voice, data, and video (triple play).

This paradigm shift brings challenges and opportunities to system developers and raises the threshold of entry. To become a successful player in this new world one needs to understand the full value chain of the new ecosystem. The existing base of deployed system, equipments, and hierarchies can’t be overhauled overnight due to business, political, and regulatory reasons and one need to work in the confine of these constraints. Coexistence and collaboration across the heterogeneous systems and platforms need to be evaluated and commonality across must be exploited. We have to take advantage of the recent advancements in VLSI, system integration, and signal processing technologies. The mobile industry has been in the forefront and enabler of this transformation. They have taken full advantage of Moore’s law in integrating myriad of complementary applications such as WLAN, BT, 3D gaming, GPS, camera, audio/video streaming, and personal productivity gadgets to name a few. And this all has been done under the constraints of the device size and battery power. It is no coincidence that today’s mobile device deliver the capabilities of PC of yester years.

There has been a lot of progress already made towards the global convergence but more needs to be done. If current trend continues then there is a safe bet to say that today’s mobile evolution would be able to reduce the “digital divide” for the human kind globally.