Interworking and interoperability issues for North American PCS

Six air interface standards for personal communications service (PCS) based on two different mobile application parts (MAPs) have been adopted by the TIA TR-46 committee, for PCS to deliver seamless communications, it is important to solve the interworking and interoperability (I&I) issues between similar and dissimilar systems. We examine I&I issues between similar and dissimilar systems. We focus on the I&I issues related to authentication and registration, intersystem startup, intersystem handoff, and privacy, and point out the problems that must be addressed to achieve seamless communications for the PCS environment. The TIA's proposed solution to achieve I&I between the IS-41 and DCS1900 MAPs is also evaluated using a simple traffic model in the metropolitan (urban) environment. The proposed solution puts a significant amount of additional signaling load on the network.