Energy-efficient wireless ATM design

efficiency is an important issue for mobile computers since they must rely on their batteries. We present an architecture for wireless ATM and a novel MAC protocol that achieves a good energy efficiency of the wireless interface of the mobile and provides QoS support for diverse traffic types. The main principles used are to avoid unsuccessful actions, to minimise the number of transitions, and to synchronise the mobile and the base-station. The protocol is able to provide near-optimal energy efficiency (i.e. energy is spent for the actual transfer only) for a mobile within the constraints of the QoS of all connections in a cell, and only requires a small overhead. The architecture of the network interface uses a dynamic error control adapted to the QoS and traffic type of a connection, and has dedicated connection queues and flow control for each connection.