A non-disruptive handoff protocol with dynamic channel reservation for wireless ATM networks

This paper presents a non-disruptive handoff protocol with dynamic channel reservation for wireless ATM networks. A mobile host (MH) in a wireless network is highly probable to travel from one radio cell to another radio cell. It is therefore very important to design an efficient handoff protocol for wireless ATM networks to re-establish a ATM virtual circuit as soon as a handoff request is initiated. In our protocol design, an MH sends a handoff request to its original base station (BS), which in turn forwards this request to its control function. One of the innovative designs of this protocol is to perform non-disruptive handoff with dynamic channel reservation over an ATM virtual circuit, regardless of which radio cell the MH is moving to. For the purpose of evaluation, a simulator is built to demonstrate that a nondisruptive handoff with dynamic channel reservation does significantly reduce the average waiting time during handoff