I'm a systems engineer involved in the design of unmanned vehicles and I
am soooo frustrated with 802.11. The limitations of 802.11, especially in
unlicensed bands, are a common problem in applications where real-time
wireless control is a requirement. There is currently some research in
using QOS enhancements and multi-radio-diversity to get around the
unpredictable latency problems of 802.11 but those avenues will fall short
of the end goal: reliable high bandwidth communications in a
non-line-of-sight environment.

I played around a bit with ATM in the mid-90s and am wondering if any of
the researchers or vendors are continuing the path of bringing ATM to the
wireless world. I know from my own experience that because of the ACK/NAK
802.11 facilities large datagrams are statistically more likely to fail
and retries will bog down the network. The small cell characteristics of
ATM, combined with FEC (forward error correction) would seem to be a step
in the right direction if a better link layer protocol was implemented.

Can anyone shed some light on whether wireless ATM is an active research
area? or point me to some links? A lot of the links I've seen are from
research that is many years old.

Some may consider the question to be off-topic, but the technology would
be applicable to wireless internet too.

Thanks