PCS mobility support over fixed ATM networks

As broadband multimedia services and wireless services become popular, there is growing interest in the industry to support ATM over a wireless link, and wireless access to fixed ATM networks. We focus on the internetworking of PCS and ATM networks, in which the air interface remains one of the PCS standards and the backbone is an ATM network with mobility support. It is desirable to minimize the impact of the internetworking and mobility support on the existing/emerging PCS and ATM specifications. A network architecture, a protocol reference model, and signaling protocols for PCS mobility support over fixed ATM networks are described. They are compared against other implementation alternatives and the trade-offs are discussed. Some performance results of the proposed architecture are also presented.