In wireless asynchronous transfer mode (WATM) networks, the mobility of mobile terminals causes handovers between base stations or between ATM switches. During a handover, the connection path must be re-established because ATM switches communicate in the connection-oriented mode. Different approaches have been proposed to handle handovers but the incremental reestablishment scheme is expected to be fast, efficient, and transparent among them. Its implementation is composed of two steps - finding a crossover switch (COS) between the current path and the new path in the first step and setting up a new partial path in the second step. However this implementation may cause long latency and heavy signaling overhead in wide area network. In this paper, we propose a new implementation technique of the incremental reestablishment scheme which finds a crossover switch and sets up a new partial path at one time using a new signaling message. This proposed technique makes a significant improvement in terms of latency and signaling overhead.
