Many service providers are providing broadband wireless solutions across the world. Corporations and consumers are expected to adopt wireless solutions in large numbers. The technology is becoming ubiquitous, available in handsets and handheld devices.

As mentioned by the authors, the book provides a comprehensive understanding of the systems engineering principles and details needed to implement wireless broadband applications using asynchronous transfer mode (ATM) interworking methods. This is done with an emphasis on traffic management and quality of service issues. The book is well written, and can be used by practitioners, engineers, and network operators in the telecommunications field, as well as by students and teachers in master’s or higher level courses in universities.

The first few chapters of the book describe the current states of the wireline and wireless fields, and the need for them to work together. The fundamental building blocks of today’s networks, Internet protocol (IP), ATM, frame relay, local multipoint distribution system (LMDS), and a host of other protocols are explained in a lucid fashion. Internetworking between IP and ATM, IP and frame relay, and frame relay and ATM are dealt with in great detail. One of the key highlights of the book is its excellent illustration of network diagrams, and dissection of protocol header and packet details. True to the saying, “A picture is worth a thousand words,” many network diagrams are presented throughout the book. This will be tremendously helpful to readers who wish to comprehend the intricacies of protocols and the interworking between them.

Traffic management in ATM networks is described elegantly. This is a crucial area in designing networks and in provisioning services with specific quality of service requirements. The design and explanation presented in the book both take into consideration wireless segments and interworking between heterogeneous protocols of different characteristics. Traffic contract principles (constant bit rate, variable bit rate, and so on) are explained with graphs and mathematical equations. The issues involved in wireless interworking and bandwidth allocation problems are dealt in a separate chapter.

The book concludes by looking at some more recent technologies, such as differentiated services, multi-protocol label switching (MPLS), optical networks, and 3G networks, and the impact of these on ATM internetworking.

Appropriate references to Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) requests for comments (RFCs) and ATM Forum documents are given in each chapter. This will be especially useful to implementers of protocols. The comprehensive acronym list at the end of the book will be convenient for all readers, since the field of networking is filled with jargon and acronyms.

The authors have made the subject matter cohesive by explaining protocol basics, and the interrelationship between ATM, IP, and wireless technologies in a smooth manner. The book does not include any exercises, though these would have benefited students reading the book. Even without exercises, this would be a useful textbook for researchers and students.

Overall this is an excellent book, describing the system engineering issues of ATM interworking in designing broadband wireless applications. This field is littered with many standards documents: a book bringing all the points together, with clear diagrams, is a welcome change.