Introduction

23.1013GPPGeneral Universal Mobile Telecommunications System (UMTS) architectureRelease 17TS

UMTS will support a wide range of applications with different quality of service profiles. At present many of these applications are not possible to predict. Also the usage of the different applications are difficult to predict i.e. it is not possible to optimise UMTS to only one set of applications. One conclusion of this is that UMTS must be built in such a way that it is flexible and possible to evolve so it will have a long technical lifetime. Therefore a modular approach is recommended when defining the network parts of UMTS. This is in line with the recommendation from GMM. In this context a module represents a part of a UMTS network i.e. one or several physical network nodes that together implements some functionality. The modular approach should also make UMTS possible to implement efficiently in different environments.