Traffic Integration in Personal, Local, and Geographical Wireless Networks

Currently, users identify wireless networks with firstand second-generation cellular telephony networks. Although voice and short messaging have driven the success of these networks so far, data and more sophisticated applications are emerging as the future driving forces for the extensive deployment of new wireless technologies. In this chapter, we will consider future wireless technologies that will provide support to different types of traffic including legacy voice applications, Internet data traffic, and sophisticated multimedia applications. In the near future, wireless technologies will span from broadband wide-area technologies (such as satellite-based networks and cellular networks) to local and personal area networks. In this chapter, for each class of network, we will present the emerging wireless technologies for supporting service integration. Our overview will start by analyzing the Bluetooth technology [30] that is the de facto standard for wireless personal area networks (WPANs), i.e., networks that connect devices placed inside a circle with radius of 10 meters. Two main standards exist for wireless local area networks (WLANs): IEEE 802.11 [21] and HiperLAN [15]. In this chapter we focus on the IEEE 802.11 technology, as it is the technology currently available on the market. After a brief description of the IEEE 802.11 architecture, we will focus on the mechanisms that have been specifically designed to support delay-sensitive traffic. For wireless wide area networks, we will focus on the technology for third-generation mobile radio networks. Two standards are emerging worldwide for this technology: the Universal Mobile Telecommunication System (UMTS) of the European Telecommunication Standard Institute (ETSI), and the International and Mobile Telecommunications2000 (IMT-2000) of the International Telecommunication Union (ITU). The differences between these two standards are not relevant for the discussion in this chapter. Whenever necessary, we will use UMTS as the reference technology [1, 32]. All the network technologies analyzed in this chapter operate according to the infrastructure-based approach (see Figure 7.1). An infrastructure-based architecture imposes the existence of a centralized controller for each cell, which takes different names depend-