INTRODUCTION*Customer service requirements are making it desirable to support a wide range of multimedia applications in wireless networks. ATM is a network protocol that supports high speed switching and multiplexing of voice, video, data, and imagery regardless of the format. Application data is transmitted in short, fixed-size cells comprising a five-byte header (40 bits) and a 48-byte payload (384 bits). The header conveys addressing information, while the payload contains information bits that represent a segment of user data. Although not originally developed for wireless applications, the use of ATM in wireless networks is currently receiving a good deal of attention.Significant interest in wireless digital video has developed due to applications such as telemedicine and video teleconferencing over wireless LANs. Uncompressed video has bit rate requirements on the order of 270 Mbps.However bandwidth in wireless networks is limited, and compression is essential for wireless video applications. The Moving Picture Experts Group (MPEG) family of standards is an internationally accepted video compression standard that provides a variety of video qualities over a range of different bit rates. The MPEG-2 standards support intemet-quality to HDTV-quality video, and the MPEG-4 standards are being optimized for robust transmission of very low bit rate video. The MPEG standards specify the video stream syntax and semantics to be used to correctly decode the video stream. The encoding process is not defined which allows continued refinement of the encoding algorithm.ATM is designed to facilitate hgh-speed transport of multimedia services in optical networks where communication channels have large bandwidths and low error rates or better). For wireless applications, link bandwidths are generally small and error rates large. Limited bandwidth, however, does not preclude the use of ATM.When bandwidth is limited, multimedia applications with diverse quality of service (QoS) requirements can be supported through the use of compression techniques and by reducing the number of users. A more fundamental problem is that the quality of the wireless links can be poor. Channel bit error rates can be high, and a mixture of independent and burst-error phenomena can exist.Depending on the type of application supported, the effects of these errors can range from not perceptible to catastrophic. To support a variety