Abstract
Management of terminal handovers is one of the challenges in mobile Wireless ATM (W--ATM) systems due to the connection-oriented nature of ATM. When the ATM connection is re-established to follow the terminal roaming from one base station to another, seamless handover is necessary to guarantee the required Quality of Service (QoS). A promising procedure is based on the use of handover buffers at the (destination) base station.This paper proposes a technique to reduce the buffer requirements in seamless handovers by introducing the concept of Buffer Sharing at the Base Station (B^2S^2): connections requiring handover at the same time and towards the same base station share a common pool of buffers available at the base station. When compared to the standard Dedicated Buffer (DB) approach, B^2S^2 achieves the required QoS with a reduced total buffer size, and consequently with a reduced cost of the base station. Simulation and numerical results are discussed to quantify this reduction.