| Abstract: | This paper presents a signaling architecture for supporting mobility in radio asynchronous transfer mode (ATM) networks. A new concept of mobile software agent, known as ‘representative’, is used for insulating fixed network entities from the effects of user mobility. It is shown that, depending on the physical locations of the mobile terminals, their representatives can be used for distributing the mobility management load within the fixed backbone network. This paper describes a location and a representative management scheme followed by a novel connection caching strategy which is used for implementing a family of low-latency and scalable ATM connection handovers. A prototype implementation of the proposed architecture and the associated experimental results are also presented to demonstrate the feasibility and performance of this agent-based signaling scheme. ©1997 by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. |
