Impact of burst errors on framing

There has been an emerging interest in using ATM for wireless transmissions. Because ATM is primarily designed for a rather benign error free environment, in the wireless context the sources of errors and their consequences must be thoroughly understood. While this concern is valid in any network, it takes on a new more central role in the mobile wireless environment, where error bursts are expected to be a very significant source of degradation. These concerns motivate this study of the impact of errors on ATM cell transfer in the wireless environment. In this paper, we examine the impact of burst errors on the direct transfer of ATM cells taking into account the cell framing format. We examine the consequences of interleaving as well as the impact of fading. We find that fragmenting the data in cells could result in a much higher error rate as seen by the higher layers relative to the bit error rate on the raw channel.