A new adaptive forward error correction scheme for ATM and wireless ATM networks

Wireless Asynchronous Transfer Mode (WATM) systems have been proposed for future broadband multimedia personal communication. The errors in the wireless channel are characterized by burstier error patterns which are time varying in nature [1, 2, 3]. The cell losses in Asynchronous Transfer Mode (ATM) occur mostly due to buffer overflow resulting in burst cell losses [4, 5]. Most of the existing error correcting codes do not adequately account for the burst errors and concentrate only on cell errors rather than cell losses [6, 7]. Hence, they are not suitable for time-varying channels like WATM. Efficient error control for the time-varying channel can be realized with an adaptive coding scheme, which adjusts according to the network characteristics.