Handover in a high-speed wireless ATM based LAN

A mobility-enhanced network model is used to evaluate the terminal mobility issues in high-speed wireless asynchronous transfer mode based local area network, as considered in the ACTS project MEDIAN (Wireless Broadband Customer Premises Network/Local Area Network for Professional and Residential Multimedia Applications). Handover can be considered as an essential issue with respect to cell delay and queue size in relation to the scheduling principle used in the multi-access control (MAC). A simple handover scheme is proposed which can be realised with minor modifications in the MAC of MEDIAN like systems. Simulation results show the influence of handover on the scheduling principle in relation to the effect on the existing background traffic in the coverage areas. To guarantee a minimum bandwidth during handover it is proposed to implement traffic control functions either in the logical link control (e.g. priority mechanism) or in the MAC (e.g. number of cells in frame parameter).