A novel delineation mechanism for the ATM adaptation layer 2 over wireless ATM networks

The ATM adaptation layer 2 (AAL2) has been standardized by the ITU-T for the support of low data rate and delay-sensitive applications, such as voice, over ATM networks. One of the main characteristics of the AAL2 standard is the support for multiplexing information at the expense of introducing a new frame structure inside the payload of the ATM cells. The AAL2 standard introduces a mechanism for the delineation of the AAL2 packets and it has been found that the delineation mechanism reduces the performance of AAL2 in the presence of channels with high bit error rates. In this paper, a novel delineation mechanism is proposed for AAL2 to be used over highly error-prone channels, such as wireless links. The proposed mechanism improves the performance (i.e. reduces packet loss) of the AAL2 standard in the presence of bit errors and in some cases reduces the overhead required for the delineation of the AAL2 packets. Copyright (C) 2002 John Wiley Sons, Ltd.