Towards Wireless Multimedia Communications - Current Standards and Future Directions

Today we face two major trends in communications technology, multimedia and mobile communications. Therefore, future wireless communication systems need to support many different services. Yet while in wired networks the migration to ATM based Broadband ISDN is visible, wireless ATM (WATM) internetworking for mobile clients is still in its infancy. In this article first a brief overview of the current mobile communications standards GSM and DECT is presented and reasons are given, why they fail to deliver adequate performance for multimedia data transfer. Then the recently approved wireless local area network (WLAN) standards IEEE 802.11 and ETSI HIPERLAN 1 are detailed and their suitability for the transparent transfer of ATM cells is discussed. Last, the ongoing work of the ATM Forum’s WATM Working Group and the efforts of the ETSI RES 10 regarding the further development of HIPERLAN 2, 3 and 4 are shown. Finally, WATM prototypes in testing are described, too.