Design Issues For Wireless Local Area

Abstract

The field of wireless and mobile communications is advancing rapidly in all fronts of communications industry ranging from cellular telephone to wireless data networks and wireless LANs. With the proliferation of portable and notebook computers and the need for location independent network connectivity wireless LANs are becoming prevalent. This talk concentrates on design issues associated with the current and emerging technologies in wireless local area networks. Several design issues ranging from topology considerations, media access control, system architectures and network protocols for wireless connectivity and mobile networking will be discussed. In the first part of the talk, emphasis is given to those issues impacted by the wireless connectivity. We consider several aspects of topology for ad-hoc networking and connectivity to wired LANs via base-station and non-base-station approaches. We also look at impact of direct sequence and frequency hopping spread spectrum techniques on these topologies and media access protocols for both intra-cell and inter-cell connectivity. In the second part of the talk we deal with the network control functions and protocol requirements for support of mobility over standard LAN protocols. We discuss topics related to routing, addressing and tracking of mobile users. The impact of the mobility on various layers of network protocols such as link layer and network layer will be discussed.