  Some traffic characteristics like real-time, location-based, and
community-inspired, as well as the exponential increase on the data traffic in
mobile networks, are challenging the academia and standardization communities
to manage these networks in completely novel and intelligent ways, otherwise,
current network infrastructures can not offer a connection service with an
acceptable quality for both emergent traffic demand and application requisites.
In this way, a very relevant research problem that needs to be addressed is how
a heterogeneous wireless access infrastructure should be controlled to offer a
network access with a proper level of quality for diverse flows ending at
multi-mode devices in mobile scenarios. The current chapter reviews recent
research and standardization work developed under the most used wireless access
technologies and mobile access proposals. It comprehensively outlines the
impact on the deployment of those technologies in future networking
environments, not only on the network performance but also in how the most
important requirements of several relevant players, such as, content providers,
network operators, and users/terminals can be addressed. Finally, the chapter
concludes referring the most notable aspects in how the environment of future
networks are expected to evolve like technology convergence, service
convergence, terminal convergence, market convergence, environmental awareness,
energy-efficiency, self-organized and intelligent infrastructure, as well as
the most important functional requisites to be addressed through that
infrastructure such as flow mobility, data offloading, load balancing and
vertical multihoming.
