Resource management mechanisms in wireless ATM networks

The support to ATM services in wireless mobile networks is discussed. A reference model for the network architecture is outlined and a quantitative analysis is presented, in which the efficiency of resource management mechanisms and quality of service support in a wireless ATM network is compared to that of a circuit switched network. The analysis involves mobile users belonging to two different service classes (real-time and non-real-time traffic). This study has been carried out by considering the ATM layer to receive an ideal service from the underlying radio-channel access layer. The results show that ATM resource management improves the blocking performance of the network whenever a consistent portion of the total offered traffic is represented by variable bit rate applications; the QoS is largely improved for non-real-time variable bit rate traffic and is slightly worsened for real-time constant bit rate traffic