Mobility Management in Wireless ATM Networks

0163-6804/97/$10.00 © 1997 IEEE he rapid worldwide growth of digital wireless communication services motivates a new generation of mobile switching networks to serve as infrastructure for such services. Given the wide range of radio access technologies being deployed for both telephony and Internet access, new mobile switching architectures are needed to provide generic, costeffective support for a variety of cellular, personal communications services (PCS) and wireless data technologies. In addition, mobile networks being deployed in the next few years should be capable of smooth migration to future broadband services based on high-speed wireless access technologies, such as wireless asynchronous transfer mode (ATM) (Fig. 1) [1]. This article introduces a network architecture for supporting terminal mobility in a ATM network and presents protocols for mobility management within this architecture. This architecture, which we refer to as mobile ATM, supports mobility of both ATM and non-ATM mobile terminals through a common set of protocols for location management and handoff.