Introduction

This advanced seminar on ATM is intended for people having already a basic knowledge of ATM. It will tackle four important area for the successful deploiement of the ATM.

Table of Contents

1. LAN Emulation Evolution
   

   The LAN Emulation deserves an in-depth coverage as it appears to be one of the most popular way to introduce ATM in the corporate network.
   When used as a backbone between legacy LANs implemented with switching hubs, the LANE is perceived at first side as a very useful technology for implementing the new concept of Virtual LAN in a flexible manner.
   However, its successful implementation may be linked with the type of contract which will be implemented.

2. Traffic Management in ATM Networks
   

   It is now accepted that the traffic control introduced in the initial version of the ATM services will not be able to support the successful integration of ATM in a corporate network. Its rigidity limits its usefulness and the legacy applications are requiring more flexibility and interaction between the service users and the service providers.
   To achieve this flexibility, it is essential to associate the congestion control of an ATM network with its traffic control. Furthermore, this traffic management has to be linked with an access control.
   In this section, we will present in detail the actual situation and what may be expected from the various proposals in the corporate network.

   1. The CBR and VBR service classes
      • The CBR traffic contract
      • The VBR traffic contract
   2. The UBR service class
      • Motivations and characteristics of the UBR service class
      • TCP over UBR ATM
      • Discarding strategies : PPD and EPD
      • Is EPD really the solution to all congestion problems ?
   3. The ABR service class
      • Motivations and design goals for the ABR
      • The rate-based proposal
      • The credit-based proposals
      • The rate-based versus credit based debate
      • Virtual sources and virtual destinations
      • Congestion control for point-to-multipoints
      • Policing issues
   4. Fast reservation protocols : an alternative to ABR ?
      • Motivations and some early proposals
      • The fast reservation protocol proposed within ITU
      • The ABT service class of the ITU
      • The higher layer protocols and the FRP

3. Routing and Switching
   

   It is now obvious, with the success of the Internet, that IP has demonstrated its capability to provide a world wide service.
   Its assets are the handling of the addresses and the performances of the routing protocols. But the success requires now more bandwidth and more powerful routers to avoid a deadly congestion of the Internet.
   As ATM has demonstrated its capability to provide high data rates and efficient switching, it is tempting to integrate the best of both worlds.
   Proposals from Ipsilon Networks, Toshiba, Cisco and IBM are going in this direction.
   We will examine in detail these approaches and discuss the possibility of an open standard in this very important area.

   1. The SMDS service as an overlay network
   2. Hard state and soft state
   3. The flow concept in IP
   4. The IP Switching proposal from Ipsilon
   5. The Tag Switching proposal of Cisco
   6. The others proposal
   7. The MPLS Working Group of the IETF

4. Audio-Video Multimedia Services in ATM
   

   If there is a trend to support real time multimedia application by an evolution of the TCP/IP communication stack, as discussed in the tutorial of Jean-Yves Le Boudec (16 April 1997), another possibility based on a more direct access of the multimedia application to the ATM service must also be taken into account.
   After the presentation of the later approach for the multimedia service on demand for the residential user, with different access networks, we will discuss the situation in corporate networks in general and in an Intranet in particular. A possible integration of the both approaches will be presented.

   1. High throughput access network for the residential user
      • ADSL, SDSL and VDSL
      • HFC Networks
   2. The models for on demand high speed service
      • The Davic Model
      • The ATM Forum View
   3. Will the residential service converges to the corporate network service ?

André DANTHINE, Professor at the University of Liège since 1967, created a research unit in networking (RUN) in 1972. In 1990, Prof. Danthine launched a new Esprit project, OSI95, to tackle the problem of the design of a new transport service and protocol (TPX) for multimedia applications in a high speed environment including B-ISDN. In 1991, he joined the RACE Project CIO. It is in the framework of this project that the ATM LAN of RUN has been connnected, at 34 Mbps, to the European ATM Pilot for functional and performance evaluations. Since 1994, Prof. Danthine is also involved in another RACE project, ACCOPI. November 1995 was the starting point of OKAPI, an ACTS project.
Since 1992, Prof. Danthine is the chairman of the COST action 237 on "Multimedia Telecommunication Services".
Prof. Danthine is a member of ACM, of IEEE, of the Editorial Board of "ETT", of the Editorial Advisory Board of the Wiley Series in "Communication and Distributed Systems", editor of several books and proceedings and author of more than hundred papers. Chairman of the TC6 of IFIP from 1979 to 1985, he is Governor of ICCC since 1982. CRB Fellow in 1960, he received the Melchior Salier Prize in 1960, the "Bell Telephone-100th Anniversary" prize in 1983 and the IFIP Silver Core in 1986. In 1993-1994, he was Francqui Professor at the VUB. He is Doctor of Science Honoris Causa of the University of Kent (1991) and of the University Paul Sabatier in Toulouse (1996).