A distributed paths migration scheme for IEEE 802.6 based personal communication networks

Wireless personal communications will be provided via the usage of microcells in urban areas. The current centralized architecture may be unsuitable with the increased processing load and handoff rate associated with microcells. Some distributed architectures based upon interconnected IEEE 802.6 MANs for wireless personal communications have been proposed recently. The IEEE 802.6 MAN is attractive since it also provides isochronous services which are quite suitable for voice communications. In such a network, a communication path between two mobile terminals may be inefficient due to the lack of better paths when the path is established or become inefficient due to the mobility of terminals, e.g., the path elongates and consumes too much isochronous channels. In this paper, a distributed paths migration scheme is proposed for the IEEE 802.6 based personal communication networks. This distributed scheme automatically recognizes inefficient paths and migrates them to better ones, if any. During the migration, the property of isochronous services is also preserved. The performance of this scheme is evaluated by simulations. Simulation results show that the proposed paths migration scheme dramatically reduces the number of isochronous channels consumed per path. As a result, the call blocking rate is reduced and the number of successful established paths is increased significantly