The University of British Columbia

The author presents a novel distributed architecture for wireless local area networks (WLANs), where each wireless terminal internetworks with a backbone local area network (LAN) via several radio bridges. The site diversity affords some protections against slow fading and shadowing in the indoor environment. Multiaccess interference from multiple sites sharing the same radio channel is minimized by exploiting the capture effect of spread-spectrum signalling, which also gives additional protections against interference from multipath signals. The internetworking protocol employs a self-learning routing algorithm, which automatically adapts to changes in terminal locations, and prevents multiple copies of each data frame from being forwarded over the backbone LAN. The distributed WLAN architecture eases the management of network topological changes and terminal mobility relative to centralized cellular architectures