In personal communications, the necessity for providing personal mobility as well as terminal grows more larger. In the process of supporting personal mobility, the volume of signaling traffic necessary for transporting relevant data may be two times compared to that of signaling traffic. Thus the ATM technology which has unique advantages in broadband networks may be used to provide reliable signaling transport of vast traffic volume. As the cell is changed from macro to micro and to pico, and wireless networks are being evolved to accommodate data as well as voice, the signaling load will be increased. Furthermore, if the personal mobility service is added to the wireless networks, the load will be more increased. Being focused on the main subject of personal mobility, this paper presents how and how much ATM-based signaling networks could improve the performance of the existing CCS No.7(Common Channel Signaling System No.7)-based signaling networks. In this paper, the basic simulations events are the terminal plus personal mobility registration. Since the increased mobility results in heavy registration signaling traffic, its processing delay time is exponentially increased and its throughput is decreased rapidly. According to the simulation results, the delay time of ATM-based signaling networks are much smaller than that of No.7-based signaling networks. In view of throughput performance of the ATM-based signaling network is outstanding. These performance improvements are thought to be arisen from the distributed characteristics of ATM-based networks. The results show that if various mobility services such as terminal mobility, personal mobility, and service mobility are should be surprised, it will be desirable to use the ATM-based distributed signaling networks rather than centralized CCS No.7.
