LOW-LATENCY HANDOVER IN A WIRELESS ATM LAN

The micro- and picocellular architectures proposed for wireless ATM: L AN's lead to wireless terminals frequently changing their point of att achment to the network. Because ATM connections have duality of servic e (QoS) guarantees which must be maintained, handover must be as seaml ess as possible. We present a novel architecture and protocol which pr imarily aims to keep the interruption period due to handover low, rath er than seeking to keep the process entirely lossless. We compare the tradeoffs made with those in other schemes from the literature, and gi ve quantitative results from an implementation of our scheme on a 10 M bits/s(-1) prototype wireless ATM LAN.