There has been an emerging interest in using ATM for wireless transmissions. Because ATM is primarily designed for an essentially 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 wireless environment, where error bursts as expected to be a very significant source of degradation. In this article we examine the impact of burst errors on the direct transfer of ATM cells over a wireless channel, taking into account the cell framing format as well as the cell delineation and synchronization mechanism. We also investigate the consequences of interleaving. 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. We assess the adequacy of HEC-based cell delineation and deduce the most appropriate values of the parameters of the cell delineation algorithm for the wireless channel.
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