WIRELESS ATM NETWORK INTERFACE CARD

Abstract

With the provision of the B-ISDN(Broadband integrated services Digital Network) in the communication areas, more and more attention has been focused on the area of cellular and wireless networks. The ultimate goal of the future wireless system is to provide various data traffic services regardless of user locations or movements. The current issues are for the standardization of access protocols which should not only be able to handle multiple access with various traffic patterns, but also be able to offer seamless integration for information transfer from the wireless domain to the wired domain for the various Quality of Service. In this thesis, a Time Division Multiple Access with Dynamic Reservation (TDMA/DR) protocol is presented. In order to investigate the benefits of the TDMA/DR protocol implementation in a real environment and to develop a better understanding of the performance expected from a wireless ATM (Asynchronous Transfer mode) access system, an experimental prototype of wireless ATM network interface controller (NIC) has been designed so that it can support the TDMA/DR protocol as well as provide an interface from portable terminal to the wireless ATM network domain. The experimental evaluation of the NIC hardware and software has been performed. The developed hardware/software architecture not only provides the necessary performance, but also is sufficiently flexible to allow experimentation with portions of the protocol stack as well as focusing on architectural solutions to achieve good cost/performance.