Buffer sharing at the base station for seamless handover in mobile ATM networks

Management of terminal handovers is one of the challenges in mobile wireless ATM (W-ATM) systems due to the connection-oriented nature of ATM. When the ATM connection is re-established to follow the terminal roaming from one base station to another, seamless handover is necessary to guarantee the required quality of service (QoS). A promising procedure is based on the use of handover buffers at the (destination) base station. This paper proposes a technique to reduce the buffer requirements in seamless handovers by introducing the concept of buffer sharing at the base station (B²S²): connections requiring handover at the same time and towards the same base station share a common pool of buffers available at the base station. When compared to the standard dedicated buffer (DB) approach B ²S² achieves the required QoS with a reduced total buffer size, and consequently with a reduced cost of the base station. Simulation and numerical results are discussed to quantify this reduction