Moby Dick Consolidated System Integration Plan

D0103v1.doc Version 1 6.7.2003
Executive Summary
In recent years, two parallel developments could be observed in telecommunications. First, the
tremendous success of the Internet and second, the success of the mobile telephones. UMTS is the
technology which will integrate both developments. However, it is not clearly visible in the existing
architecture which of the two network philosophies, connection oriented 2 G based architecture or packetoriented
Internet compatible technology, will dominate. Currently researchers and marketing people from
both, network provider and equipment vendor tend towards a long term All-IP based solution. Both
technologies have their advantages and disadvantages and, since we have never seen a revolution in the
network infrastructure, the transition process from a connection-oriented world to a packet-oriented world
will be smooth and backward compatibility is a very important issue.
Within the Moby Dick project, we took the opportunity to go straight forward towards an All-IP based
solution without taking care of such backward compatibility issues to the connection-oriented “Telephone
World”, however, to the currently deployed Internet. Based on this assumption, a wireless IP world
replacing any connection-oriented elements of the network, the IST project Moby Dick develops and
implements an architecture which substitutes all the network elements and mechanisms historically based
on the GSM based network architecture and combines these with available IP based mechanisms and
network elements to come to a scalable network architecture which would be a possible candidate for the
3,5 G and beyond based wireless access network infrastructure. Within this context is should be clearly
stated that the term ALL-IP is user in a various number of different flavours and is somehow not clear.
Especially the approaches deriving from the circuit switched GSM based technology claim to be “ALL-
IP” although having a significant part of circuit switched elements in their architecture. That’s why
sometimes Moby Dick partner used either the term “real-ALL IP” or “pure-IP” indicating that the Moby
Dick approach is more in the “spirit” of the Internet compared to most other existing approaches.
At the end of this project, which is due to 6 months (end 2003), the consortium should be able to give an
answer to the question if the Internet Protocol is able to replace the existing connection-oriented
infrastructure. The Moby Dick goal is to answer this question quantitatively as well as qualitatively. In
order to achieve this, the Moby Dick architecture contains modifications and changes of existing
protocols and IP-based mechanisms, mainly derived from the Internet standardization bodies, but do not
target the development of fundamental new protocols. The requirement of such fundamental new protocol
could be one potential outcome of the project.
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