Managing mobility in a wireless ATM network

Abstract

The growing fields of wireless networks and asynchronous transfer mode (ATM) are merging to form wireless ATM networks. This paper addresses dynamic bandwidth allocation, connection admission procedures, routing, and location management strategies in wireless ATM. More precisely, we investigate the issue of extending the Private Network to Network Interface, PNNI, protocol to support mobility. PNNI-based hierarchical routing, hand-off location management and routing schemes are proposed to integrate wireless capabilities. These schemes provide a reduction in the connection disruption time during a connection handoff session and a predictable resource need of the mobile during its connection. This substantially reduces the overhead due to end-to-end re-transmissions invoked at higher layer. An analytical model is developed to illustrate the hand-off algorithm.