Personal Communication Network (PCN) is an emerging wireless network that promises many new services for the telecommunication industry. The high speed backbone network (asynchronous transfer mode, ATM or wavelength division multiplexing, WDM) is one possible approach to provide broadband wireless transmission with PCN’s using the ATM switches for interconnection of PCN cells. The wireless ATM backbone network design (WABND) problem is to allocate backbone links among ATM switches such that the effects of terminal mobility on the performance of ATM-based PCN’s can be reduced. In this paper, the WABND problem is formulated and studied. The goal of the WABND is to minimize the location update cost under constraints. Since WABND is an NP-hard problem, two heuristic algorithms and a simulated annealing algorithm were proposed and used to find the close-to-optimal solutions. The simulated annealing algorithm was able to achieve good performance as indicated from the simulated results.