A Networking Concept for Wide Area Mobility and Fast Handover in ATM Networks

Future Personal Communication Networks (PCN), due to the growing user demand in personal communication services in combination with the ongoing development of broadband wireless air interface access technology, are expected to offer broadband multimedia services using the ATM/B-ISDN as the backbone transport network. This paper proposes a new operational concept for such a mobile ATM network, called the Mobile Virtual Path network Architecture (MVPA), minimizing the handover signalling load and facilitating high handover frequencies. Signalling and control functions for connection setup and rerouting during handover are presented, as well as means for preventing cell loss and maintaining cell sequence integrity during handover.