ACTS MEDIAN: a wireless LAN supporting ATM at 155 Mb/s

There is growing interest in the concept of 'wireless ATM', the transport of ATM cells over the air interface, thereby offering new transparent wireless connectivity to ATM terminals and networks, in LAN, local loop and peer-to-peer scenarios. This paper describes the technical approach being followed by the ACTS MEDIAN project to realise such a wireless ATM LAN, supporting bit rates of 155 Mb/s at 60 GHz. In particular, means to combat the hostile radio environment, namely the COFDM modulation scheme and the data link control, and to share the available bandwidth resource, namely the medium access control (MAC), are discussed.