Pierre Boyer

Accelerated Signalling for the Internet over ATM (ASIA)

To face up the rapid development of Internet services with even more growing needs in terms of quality of service and bandwidth, we introduce in this paper an accelerated signalling capability for the ATM network. As a preliminary, we draw attention to the fact that cell spacing can regulate the dynamics of TCP over ATM if the spacing period is adequately chosen. Then, we propose to associate with each Internet information flow (generated by TCP or UDP) a Deterministic Bit Rate (DBR) virtual channel connection within the ATM network. The cell spacing mechanism actually makes the cell stream of an Internet information flow compliant with a DBR connection, for which quality of service objectives in terms of negligible cell loss and bounded cell transfer delays can be guaranteed. To achieve this, we study a synchronization method between the two connection establishment procedures, namely that at the Internet protocol level and the signalling procedure for the ATM network. The ATM connection is established throughout the network via a light-weight signalling procedure, which relies on the exchange of single cell messages consisting of Resource Management (RM) cells. The addressing system proposed for this accelerated signalling capability is that of classical IP, which is and will certainly be the predominant one in the near future.

Fast resource management in ATM networks

Network resource management is a constant problem, even in high-speed networks. In permanent connections, set-up is done once, which implies allocating some network resources regardless of the real-time traffic profile. On the opposite, switched connections are made only when necessary and break when no longer needed. Therefore, switched connections can be viewed as an approach to network resource management of sporadic traffic profiles. However, switching connections implies the design and deployment of large signalling systems. In addition, the set-up phase duration is not expected to range below a few hundreds of ms which can be far too large for small bursts of activity.