A wireless personal communications architecture for urban areas

The current centralized wireless communication architectures are considered inappropriate to cope with the anticipated demand for personal communications. The paper proposes a distributed architecture for wireless communications based upon the interconnection of radio base stations using the IEEE 802.6 MAN. Traffic analysis illustrates that several MANs will be required to provide coverage for a metropolitan area. Initially every MAN could be directly connected to every other MAN. As the number of deployed MANs increases however, a more eloquent solution will be required. The authors propose an architecture where several MANs are connected to a backbone MAN. It is shown that this topology facilitates relatively simple procedures for both call setup and interMAN handoffs