Strategy for an ATM interconnect network

Abstract

Rapidly growing needs for communication between private installations can be eWected for the next couple of years. This communication includes a wide variety of voice, data and video traffic. The service birrates required are between a few Bit and the order of hundred Mbit per second. Interworking with the existing subscriber premises equipment is mandatory, and interworking with the public exchange is desirable. Most of the connections should be semi-permanent, but there is also a demand for dialled connections, especially for broadband services, which will be pre-standard and provisional in the next few years due to the lack of interface and signalling standards. In this paper the requirements for an ATM Interconnect Network are derived followed by descriptions of the proposed interfaces and services and the functional system architecture, in which a Metropolitan Area Network (MAN) according to IEEE standard 802.6 is combined with an ATM network Some deeper view is given on the interconnection of Local Area Networks (LANs), which is seen as the most urgent requirement.