The proliferation of wireless and mobile computing
and networking that creates the bases for global nomadicity,
which is the ability to communicate from everywhere to anywhere
by everyone, has experienced exponential growth. The advent
of mobile-centric and wireless devices and the need to preserve
and apply the ubiquitous Internet technology, which was originally
conceived when mobility was not an issue, has posited the
need to create augmented and modified models of communication
that attempt to preserve the semantic integrity and transparency
independent of the underlying communication infrastructure.
Moreover, the number, the power and the richness
of the applications developed for mobile and wireless products
include multimedia capabilities whose proper execution depends
on the essential network attributes such as bandwidth, delay
and reliability. These attributes are also the components
of the Quality of Service (QoS).
Some of the problems in a heterogeneous wireless
networks that either directly or indirectly influence the
QoS are well known. These include but are not limited to reliable
transport services, where reliability due to the infrastructure
might prove to be liability rather then an asset, then asymmetrical
nature of the traffic, and finally the problem of handoffs.
These problems have been one of the principal areas of research
in communication networks in the last several years.
In the paper, that is a report on an ongoing
research, we propose an architecture that addresses the problems
of the Internet technology deployment in wireless heterogeneous
networks through a unified conceptual model. The diversity
of this model and the basic architectural components, once
sufficiently explored and well defined, should enable to achieve
a desirable QoS for 4G networking.