Combating multipath via directional antennas for broadband wireless ATM

The rapid growth of multimedia wireless communications services spearheads the development of advanced wireless broadband systems with high reliability and high bit-rate. In order to achieve this goal, new system concepts with increased system capacity are required. Within this context, asynchronous transfer mode (ATM) is a rapidly maturing technology for a wired infrastructure and is also receiving much attention for tetherless systems, since ATM can effectively be supported by wireless access systems. This article overviews the European project, AWACS (ATM Wireless Access Communication System) which provides ATM tetherless multimedia services at 19 GHz without using any equalisers, relying instead on directive antennas. In the paper, salient features of the AWACS system, propagation results and link level simulation results, along with a description of the field trials which are to be carried out, are presented.