Signalling on ATM testbeds: an example

Due to the availability in high-speed links and switches, real-time applications such as videoconferencing have gained the interest of researchers in the fields of multimedia and high-speed networking. Videoconferencing tools such as vic have been developed and tested on some of the ATM testbeds with no support for quality of service guarantees. Mechanisms for providing quality of service guarantees for these applications need to be supported. Extensive experiments are required to validate such mechanisms and it is vital to facilitate testbeds that enable these experiments. An important functionality in such testbeds is signalling support to establish virtual circuits. The direction of signalling is discussed and an example implementation from the XUNET testbed is described.