Performance of ATM optical wireless LANs with fixed channel assignment

Infrared (IR) wireless is an alternative technology to radio communications, particularly for indoor local area networks (LANs). This paper presents a multiple access control (MAC) protocol for an indoor wireless IR-LAN that is capable of supporting the wireline asynchronous transfer mode (ATM) protocol and can therefore provide wireless access to fixed ATM networks. The collision free MAC protocol that shares the IR medium to mobile terminal units (TUs) is presented and mathematically analysed to reveal its quality parameters such as new call blocking probability, average access delay, handover blocking probability, number of handovers per call, packet dropping probability and forced termination probability. Finally, the information obtained from this study is used in link design to give numerical results of the performance of an ATM IR-LAN