T14/1 A Generic Evaluation Platform for Services Interoperability and Performance Evaluation of Heterogeneous Networks

Modern networks are characterized by dynamic expansion and heterogeneous nature due to the interconnection of components having diverse technical characteristics. As new technologies are integrated and networks are becoming even more heterogeneous in internal operation and applications support, customers expect and demand that personal communications will be capable of managing and delivering a much wider range of information services to the global market. Today, heterogeneous networks represent the new era in communications, where voice and data is offered over a single medium comprising all necessary underlying technologies for services support, authentication, security and billing. However, as its recent types (UMTS, WLAN, etc) deployment phase has clearly demonstrated, their primary aim to fully satisfy the increasing user demand in high bandwidth communications, is still beyond, as validation of the underlying services allocation mechanisms is only recently recognized as an area of technological innovation that could offer the required potential for improving performance, as services and user applications grow in versatility. This paper presents the recent technological trends in this area of heterogeneous networks technology, related to the end-to-end performance evaluation, as well as, an innovative system architecture relevant of hosting such evaluation functions. 1