Flexible IP encapsulation for IP over ATM with ATM shortcuts

Abstract

One problem for IP over ATM is the bandwidth inefficiency caused by multiple encapsulations and the ATM cell padding, especially for short and moderate data. An ATM shortcut, an ATM virtual circuit connection established for an IP flow, can allow IP packets to be routed directly by the underlaid ATM network. In this paper, we first discuss how to adopt this approach to remove the IP encapsulation for IP packets belonging to an IP flow having an ATM shortcut, then show, through simple analysis, that this effort can improve the bandwidth efficiency especially for short and moderate data when it is used jointly with the AAL2 multiplexing.