espite the explosive evolution of the cellular 1 industry during the past decade, mobile data networks keep on spreading and providing data services to numerous subscribers all over the world. This is shown by the fact that the most important wireless packet data networks, namely, MOBITEX, ARDIS, and CDPD (cellular digital packet data), are facing increasing activity in many areas, including technical and business. ARDIS (Advanced Radio Data Information Service, a subsidiary of Motorola) is one of the biggest wireless data service providers in the United States. It employs RD-LAP technology and offers wireless packet data messaging service in over 400 metropolitan areas in the United States, Puerto Rico, and the Virgin Islands, and covers about 90 percent of the urban business population [1]. The network was initially created as a private network for IBM and was later made available for public use (as a 50/50 joint venture between Motorola and IBM [2]), offering 19.2 kb/s signaling in 25 kHz channels, wide roaming, robust link layer and coding schemes, and significant overall message throughput. IBM is still ARDIS' largest customer, with more than 12,000 field engineers using the ARDIS network. RD-LAP architecture has also spread to other countries, including Canada and Germany. CDPD [3] is a new technology that has begun to spread, although perhaps not as rapidly as expected [4]. In the first nine months of 1995, CDPD service availability climbed from 12 metropolitan statistical areas (MSAs) to 49, and at the end of the year it reached over 50. CDPD was introduced by IBM as a packetswitching overlay to the existing analog cellular voice network and frequencies. This technology uses idle voice channels to multiplex short data messages and to hop among the available frequencies to find those idle channels. The air interface oper-IEEE Personal Communications