An Efficient Link Allocation Algorithm for ATM-Based Personal Communication Networks

The wireless personal communication networks (PCN) will play an important role throughout the 1990s and into the next century. Due to the demand for extending the wireless services to integrated services such as data, voice, images and video, a high-speed backbone network to connect the base stations in the microcells is required. One of the possible solutions is to apply the ATM-based backbone network. In such an ATM-based PCN, the communication path between a pair of mobile terminals might be elongated due to the mobility of terminals. Generally, there are two ways to resolve this problem. The first is to migrate the elongated path to a better one when necessary. The other is to design an appropriate backbone network by considering the mobile environment. Recently, several mechanisms based on the former approach have been proposed. In this paper, the latter approach is considered and the design problem of allocating the backbone links among the ATM switches so that the network performance affected by the terminal mobility is kept as less as possible is investigated. We show that this link allocation problem is NP-hard. A simple and efficient heuristic is also proposed for this problem. Simulation results show that based on the backbone obtained by the heuristic, the average length of each communication path is kept as short as possible even under the mobile environment. As a result, the number of successfully established paths in the network is increased significantly.