Cooperative Services for 4G

The progress in communication systems has fostered the need for a pragmatic methodology, centered on a user-centric approach, that leads to a novel vision of the Fourth Generation of Mobile Communication Systems (4G) and the definition of its key features and technological development. Along with this view, 4G will be a convergence platform that will provide clear advantages in terms of bandwidth, coverage, power consumption and spectrum usage, thus also offering a variety of new heterogeneous services (from pop-up advertisements to location-based and interactive or on-demand ones – so called IP datacasting). Though the core is still cellular, the network architecture will be predominantly extended to short-range communication systems, where the users may cooperate in a completely distributed or cellular-controlled fashion. In this paper, we propose new services derived from this vision of 4G and we give an insight of their potential social impact.