MAN-ATM internetworking and integrated services support

Metropolitan area networks (MANs) are seen as backbones to local area networks interconnection. This will provide high speed integrated services to the user. The authors investigate MAN/ATM internetworking schemes. MANs based on IEEE 802.6 are particularly attractive since the slot/cell formats of distributed queue dual bus (DQDB) and that of ATM are the same, which facilitates building simple interfaces between ATM and MAN. The authors also investigate the support of integrated services using the DQDB. Much work has gone into connection-oriented DQDB. It is enriched with signalling functions to establish and close connections, which is similar to ATM signalling. The authors intend to include another layer to the connection-oriented DQDB (CO-DQDB) which is responsible for allocating resources dynamically. It is called the QoS (quality of service) layer. This layer dynamically allocates the resources, This is very attractive particularly for "real-time" traffic.