| As a result of rapid progress in research and development, today's wireless world exhibits several heterogeneous communication networks, such as cellular networks, satellite networks, wireless local area networks (WLAN), mobile ad hoc networks (MANET), and sensor networks. These networks are complementary to each other. Hence, their integration can realize a unified wireless system that has the best features of the individual networks. This thesis introduces an integrated architecture for next generation wireless metropolitan area network, in which Wi-Fi mesh networks offer high data rate wireless access and WiMAX networks offer long distance backhaul and vehicle speed mobility. The AAA system, intersystem handoff process and end-to-end QoS provisioning are specified for this integrated wireless network.; Based on this architecture, we first propose a simple but efficient micro-mobility management protocol with the effort to reduce the signaling traffic, registration update cost and handoff delay. Then we propose an MPLS enabled micro-mobility management protocol which aims at provisioning QoS to mobile users by making use of MPLS DiffServ and traffic engineering capabilities.; A new multi-channel medium access control protocol is proposed for wireless mesh networks by taking into account the characteristics of this type of networks. Using multiple data channels significantly increases the utilization of frequency spectrum. The channel access negotiation based on the mechanism of a control message and multiple receiving busy tones provides collision free data transmission, which considerably improves the system performance compared to single channel MAC protocols and other multi-channel counterparts. |
