A Pragmatic Methodology to Design 4G: From the User to the Technology

The ever-increasing growth of user demands, the limitations of the

Third Generation of Mobile Communication Systems

(3G) and the emergence of new mobile broadband technologies on the market have brought researchers and industries to a throughout reflection on the

Fourth Generation

(4G). Many prophetic visions have appeared in literature presenting the future generation as the ultimate boundary of the wireless mobile communication without any limit in its potential, but practically not giving any designing rules and thus any definition of it. In this paper we hence propose a new user-oriented methodology that considers the user as “the angular stone in the design of 4G” and identifies his functional needs and expectations, reflecting and illustrating them in everyday life situations. In this way, we devise fundamental user scenarios where new services are significant assets for the user. The latter implicitly reveal the key features of 4G, which are then explicated in a new framework – the “user-centric” system – that, through a satellite hierarchical vision, describes the various level of interdependency among them. This approach consequently brings to the identification of the designing rules and therefore to a more pragmatic definition of 4G. Finally, an example of a new 4G application is also given in order to demonstrate the validity of the overall methodology.