A personal communication network architecture using the IEEE 802.6 MAN

The authors describe a distributed architecture based upon IEEE 802.6 metropolitan area networks (MANs) that will provide interconnection over a metropolitan area for wireless personal communications. An appropriate bridge routing strategy is suggested to interconnect the several MANs needed to cover an urban metropolitan area. A novel isochronous transport mechanism is proposed to facilitate speech silence suppression over the MAN. While a queue-arbitrated connectionless service is used for signaling over MANs to enable call setup and handoff, voice circuits are provided by means of the pre-arbitrated isochronous service. Connection issues within a metropolitan area relevant to call setup and handoff are examined. To facilitate capacity savings between voice talk spurts on the MAN, a technique is described which enables the isochronous service to accommodate data rate variations