Wireless ATM

ecent advances in the design and development of portable devices capable of wireless communications coupled with the development and deployment of asynchronous transfer mode (ATM) has brought us to the beginning of a new era in networking. ATM is designed to support high-bandwidth multimedia applications, and to provide bandwidth on demand, traffic integration, cost effectiveness, and flexible data networking. Bearing in mind that networking applications are focusing on multimedia services and ubiquitous information access, intensified by the birth of the World Wide Web, ATM is viewed as a strong candidate for support of such serviceswhich can be extended to portable devices using wireless techspecificsystem architectures and report on experiences based on designing such systems. In the first article, “Wireless ATM: A Perspective on Issues and Challenges,” Acampora provides an overview ofwireless andwired ATM physical layer and networking issues and proceeds to present a review of a system architecture to support wireless ATM. The second article, “Wireless ATM: Limits, Challenges, and Proposals” by Ayanoglu, Eng, and Karol, provides a discussion of wireless physical layer, media access layer, and networking alternatives. In addition, it presents a summary of a number of proposals to build wireless ATM systems published in the literature. In the third artiMAHMoUD NAGHSHINEH