A lossy handover scheme in the wireless ATM networks

Wireless ATM (WATM) will be used for supporting multimedia services in mobile networks. Accordingly, there has been a recent increase in research on the development of a Wireless ATM handover to support terminal mobility. The paper proposes a new lossy handover scheme for wireless ATM networks to cope with an unreliable wireless link environment. The proposed scheme adopts a forward handover method using common control channels instead of the establishment of a signaling channel on the radio link in order to reduce handover delay. In addition, this scheme applies an inband-marking cell to the existing lossy handover in order to minimize cell loss. We compared the performance of the proposed lossy forward handover with the existing backward handover. Analysis results showed that the proposed scheme could reduce handover delay and complexity by applying the forward handover with common control channels, and decrease downlink service disruption time and cell losses due to an inband-marking cell.