Handoff management and performance for wireless access using metropolitan area networks

A wireless personal communication network consisting of thousands of microcells is considered. These microcells are connected to the public telephone network through a fiber backbone consisting of multiple metropolitan area networks (MANs). The problem of handoff management in this setting is considered. The authors' approach, based on destination routing, results in loop-free shortest path routing after any number of inter-MAN handoffs. Using true distributed routing and connectionless service, it is possible to make handoff management very efficient. It is estimated that, with the proposed architecture and procedure, the delay from handoff trigger to handoff completion can be made smaller than 100 ms. It is shown that packet losses for speech are likely to be negligible. The size of buffers required to achieve low packet loss for higher bit rate data sources is discussed.