Technological progress is yielding a convergence of network access and backbone infrastructure: wide-area wireless networking, digital cellular telephony, wired and wireless IP networks, and public switched telephone networks. However, the process is far from over and many significant design challenges remain.

The UC Berkeley's Iceberg project is exploring these challenges, including how to merge the different design philosophies and requirements that are associated with each of the access and backbone technologies. We are in the process of building a large-scale testbed, based upon an IP core network, that will incorporate current and prototype networking technology.

Once it is deployed, our testbed will provide significant additional functionality beyond that which is available from the individual components, including the ability to handoff services from one network to another (e.g., transferring a call from a cell phone to wireless IP connected laptop). In addition, the infrastructure will offer ubiquitous access to information, anywhere, anyplace, anytime, and using any I/O device.

This talk will discuss the design of the Iceberg architecture and our progress is deploying the testbed. Slides for this talk are available for viewing at http://iceberg.cs.berkeley.edu/.