A cell discarding strategy to reduce cell error rate in wireless ATM networks

We introduce a cell discarding strategy to reduce the number of error cells transmitted on wireless ATM networks. The proposed strategy is based on an "interleaving" method which spreads each bit of a header field over the data field to reduce the cell loss probability. In such a method, most burst errors are transformed into single-bit errors in the header and the header error control (HEC) is able to recover it. Intuitively, each corrected cell has a higher probability to contain incorrect payload due to burst errors. When the network becomes congested, these dirty cells will be dropped first to reduce the number of error cells received by the receiver. The number of retransmitted cells is also reduced. The cell payload error probability of a corrected cell is analyzed and the performance of the proposed strategy is investigated by simulation. The simulation results show that the proposed strategy substantially improves the cell error rate received by the destinations.