Evaluation of a bandwidth assignment method in mobile ATM networks that achieve lossless handover

Burst transmission is necessary for a lossless handover scheme under which the downlink asynchronous transfer mode (ATM) cells are stored in the buffer memory of the switch during handover and then flushed into the mobile terminals after the handover. We propose a bandwidth assignment method for this handover scheme. The ATM switches divide the total bandwidth of the downlink into a normal and an extra bandwidth, and the necessary bandwidth is obtained from both of these for burst transmission while only the normal bandwidth is used for normal transmission. We use computer simulations to evaluate the probabilities of new call blocking rate, handover failure rate, and forced termination rate due to the unavailability of downlink resources in this bandwidth assignment method.