Mobility management for wireless CATM networks

A frame-structure, referred to as wireless CATM (CATV ATM) network, is introduced to provide multimedia communication to mobile terminals. The widespread CATV (community antenna TV) networks are attractive infrastructures for next generation wireless networks. Also, providing interactive broadband services over CATV networks is a big trend in communication and ATM (asynchronous transfer mode) networks with broadband communication features well fit to be the backbone of CATV networks. Thus, to extend interactive broadband services to mobile terminals, a two-tier wireless CATM network is designed by interconnecting wireless base stations via CATV networks and further connecting the CATV headends via ATM networks. In this paper, the issues of connection management and handoff handling for interactive data services over wireless CATM networks are addressed and investigated. A wireless signaling protocol for establishing mobile connections over the CATM-based wireless networks is proposed. To provide efficient bandwidth utilization, keeping the resulting path after handoff as short as possible is attempted. A seamless handoff scheme, capable of preserving data continuity, transparent to other mobile terminals, and employing a shorter path, is also evolved.