Internetworking WWANs and WLANs in Next Generation Wireless Data Networks

Hung-Yun Hsieh and Raghupathy Sivakumar
GNAN Research Group
School of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Georgia Institute of Technology

Third Generation Wireless and Beyond 2002, May 28-31, San Francisco, CA, USA


Abstract

In this paper we study the internetworking of WWANs and WLANs for next generation wireless packet data networks motivated by the capacity and coverage tradeoffs of the two networks. We compare different types of network architectures and propose a one-hop WWAN and multi-hop WLAN architecture to provide users with guaranteed service and smooth hand-offs. We then show through simulations that the proposed architecture coupled with a fine-grained packet scheduling algorithm achieves higher performance. Finally we identify several open research issues associated with the proposed architecture.


Paper: [pdf (247KB)]