Integrated telephone/fax/paging/e-mail services over ATM/MAN-based personal communication networks

An ATM/MAN-based personal communication network (PCN) architecture is presented which combines the broadcast and distributed advantages of metropolitan area networks (MANs) for handling local traffic, and the high speed switching capability of asynchronous transfer mode (ATM) for wide area connectivity. A dynamic bandwidth allocation scheme is employed to integrate different types of traffic over MANs. Simulation results are presented to illustrate the advantages of the integration scheme. We also propose a suffix-dialing method for integrating existing telephone, fax, paging and e-mail services over ATM/MAN-based PCNs using a single personal identity number (PIN)