Location Management in Wireless ATM Networks

The ITU’s choice of ATM as a reference implementation of B-ISDN networks strengthened by the combination of legacy protocols over ATM as the foundation of the new very-high-performance Backbone Network Service (vBNS) show the significance of this particular network technology in the future. Besides, the international telecommunication industry tends more and more to integrate wireless and wireline services. This vision of seamless wireline/wireless services ongoing with a corresponding network infrastructure will help the providers to reduce administrative costs –– a major market-driven aspect which most properly influenced the ATM Forum to speed up its work on a wireless ATM specification. This paper will present the ATM Forum’s view as of April 1998 towards location management in wireless ATM networks. After an abridged introduction to the area of “wireless” and “mobility”, a general but brief overview of location management in wireless ATM networks will be given. The capital part of the paper will illustrate the two possible solutions to integrate location management services in wireless ATM networks: the mobile–PNNI scheme approach and the location register scheme approach.