High Speed and Mobility – Communications in the Fast Lane?

The growing interest in distributed computing and computer networking in general on the one hand and advances in telecommunication services on the other hand have given rise to considerable R&D efforts in the area of high speed networking. The ATM (Asynchronous Transfer Mode) technology which will be used to realize the future Broadband-ISDN offers the capabilities to integrate high bandwidth multimedia and conventional data communications applications. Multimedia to the desktop and even to private homes seems to be the trend in this field for the immediate future. The second field that has been experiencing a continuous growth in recent years is mobile communications: With the tremendous success of the mobile telephone and the advent of new mobile computing applications there seems to be a growing demand for making the high performance multimedia applications currently emerging in the fixed networks available to the mobile user. In this paper we examine the possibility, and feasibility, of integrating high speed and mobility. Taking the ATM technology as the starting point we examine possible approaches for extending fixed high-speed networks via dedicated wireless links to the mobile user. Taking the technological limitations of wireless communications into account we examine the feasibility to provide the mobile user with a quality of service comparable to that experienced in fixed networks.