Mobile Internet has recently started to become a reality for
both users and operators thanks to the success of novel, extremely practical
smartphones, portable computers with easy-to-use 3G USB modems and attractive
business models. Based on the current trends in telecommunications, vendors
prognosticate that mobile networks will suffer an immense traffic explosion in
the packet switched domain up to year 2020.
One of the most important reasons of the traffic volume increase
in mobile telecommunications is demographical. According to the current
courses, world’s population is growing at a rate of 1.2 % annually, and the
total population is expected to be 7.6 billion in year 2020. This trend also implies
a net addition of 77 million new inhabitants per year.
Today, over 25% of the global population – this means about two
billion people – are using the Internet. Over 60% of the global population –
now we are talking about five billion people – are subscribers of some mobile
communication service.
Additionally, the number of wireless broadband subscriptions is
about to exceed the total amount of fixed broadband subscriptions and this
development becomes even more significant considering that the volume of fixed
broadband subscriptions is gathering much slower.
The expansion of wireless broadband subscribers not only
inflates the volume of mobile traffic directly, but also facilitates the growth
in broadband wireless enabled terminals. However, more and more devices enable
mobile access to the Internet, only a limited part of users is attracted or
open to pay for the wireless Internet services meaning that voice communication
will remain the dominant mobile application also in the future.
Despite this and the assumption of implying that the increase in
the number of people potentially using mobile Internet services will likely
saturate after 2015 in industrialized countries, the mobile Internet
subscription growth potential will be kept high globally by two main factors.
On one hand the growth of subscribers continues unbrokenly in the developing
markets: mobile broadband access through basic handhelds will be the only
access to the Internet for many people in Asia/Pacific.
On the other hand access device, application and service
evolution is also expected to sustain the capability of subscriber growth. The
most prominent effect of services and application evolution is the increase of
video traffic: it is foreseen that due to the development of data-hungry
entertainment services like television/radio broadcasting and VoD, 66% of
mobile traffic will be video by 2014.
A significant amount of this data volume will be produced by
mobile Web-browsing which is expected to become the biggest source of mobile video
traffic (e.g., YouTube). Cisco also forecasts that the total volume of video
(including IPTV, VoD, P2P streaming, interactive video, etc.) will reach almost
90 percent of all consumer traffic (fixed and mobile) by the year 2012,
producing a substantial increase of the overall mobile traffic of more than
200% each year.
Video traffic is also anticipated to grow so drastically in the
forthcoming years that it could overstep Peer-to-Peer (P2P) traffic [4].
Emerging web technologies (such as HTML5), the increasing video quality
requirements (HDTV, 3D, SHV) and special application areas (virtual reality
experience sharing and gaming) will further boost this process and set new
challenges to mobile networks. Since video and related entertainment services seems
to become dominant in terms of bandwidth usage, special optimization mechanisms
focusing on content delivery will also appear in the near future. The supposed
evolution of Content Delivery Networking (CDN) and smart data caching
technologies might have further impact on the traffic characteristics and
obviously on mobile architectures.
Another important segment of mobile application and service
evolution is social networking. As devices, networks and modes of communications
evolve, users will choose from a growing scale of services to communicate
(e.g., e-mail, Instant Messaging, blogging, micro-blogging, VoIP and video
transmissions, etc.). In the future, social networking might evolve even
further, like to cover broader areas of personal communication in a more
integrated way, or to put online gaming on the next level deeply impregnated
with social networking and virtual reality.
Even though video seems to be a major force behind the current
traffic growth of the mobile Internet, there is another emerging form of
communications called M2M (Machine-to-Machine) which has the potential to
become the leading traffic contributor in the future. M2M sessions accommodate
end-to-end communicating devices without human intervention for remote
controlling, monitoring and measuring, road safety, security/identity checking,
video surveillance, etc. Predictions state that there will be 225 million
cellular M2M devices by 2014 with little traffic per node but resulting
significant growth in total, mostly in uplink direction. The huge number of
sessions with tiny packets creates a big challenge for the operators. Central
network functions may not be as scalable as needed by the increasing number of
sessions in the packet-switched domain.
As a summary it can state that the inevitable mobile traffic
evolution is foreseen thanks to the following main factors: growth of the
mobile subscriptions, evolution of mobile networks, devices, applications and
services, and significant device increase potential resulted by the tremendous
number of novel subscriptions for Machine-to- Machine communications.
