Assessing handoff control impact on QoS in wireless ATM networks

Several factors tend to favor the use of ATM cell transport for personal communication networks (PCN). Delivering hard QoS guarantees in the wireless domain is rather difficult since assumptions made in providing QoS guarantees in wired ATM networks do not always hold in their wireless extension due to large-scale mobility requirements, limited radio channel resources and fluctuating network conditions. Renegotiation of resources allocated to the connection is often needed. At the same time, multimedia flow should be transported and presented seamlessly to the destination device with a smooth change of perceptual quality. These conditions impact our ability to deliver hard QoS guarantees in wireless ATM networks. A model for CAC and handoff control is proposed for mobility support and the provisioning of guaranteed QoS in a WATM network. The proposed architecture has very good performance and gives the ability to support multi-class and multi-channel services. Also, this model supports the seamless delivery of scalable multimedia flows with controlled QoS. Its architecture may be extended in different wireless environments other than WATM, as, due to its scalability, only small modifications are necessary.